Conference Agenda

Summary

In this tutorial, we introduce a novel way to represent the structure of theories of consciousness and their predictions. We translate claims made by theories of consciousness into “prediction maps”. Our approach builds on i) the assumption that scientific theories can be represented as networks of beliefs; and ii) the Lakatosian standpoint that theories are structured around core claims and various belts of peripheral hypotheses. This helps visualize how impactful a prediction is for the theory: the closer the prediction is to the core, the more (dis)confirmatory power it will carry. Such a visualization can be used to assess the impact of theory testing, as well as to help define the proper target of investigation when designing experiments to test theories.

In our tutorial, we will first introduce the main philosophical assumptions driving the project, and then practically show how these can be applied to specific neuroscientific theories of consciousness. Furthermore, we will present how graph theory measures can be leveraged to individuate the most influential claims of the theories. Finally, we will examine some limitations of our current framework and avenues for future research.

This tutorial sits nicely at the intersection between philosophy of science and the empirical study of consciousness, reflecting the genuine interdisciplinary nature of ASSC. The tutorial will be of interest to both scholars interested in the theoretical aspects of consciousness science and those interested in its empirical study.

Rationale on speaker selection and proof of their expertise

For the past year, our team has been working on a project to individuate and structurally represent four neuroscientific theories of consciousness: Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), and Higher-order Theories (HOTs). The project is led by Niccolò Negro, whose doctoral work focused on the philosophy of consciousness science, analysing in particular IIT from a philosophy of science perspective. This project builds on his paper “(Dis)confirming theories of consciousness and their predictions: towards a Lakatosian consciousness science”, published in Neuroscience of Consciousness.

This work is supervised by Prof. Liad Mudrik. Prof. Mudrik has been co-leading the first adversarial collaboration between IIT and GNWT. This puts her in a unique position to convey the importance of this work for empirical investigations into consciousness theories.

The other three members of the project, Eden Elbaz, Shai Fischer, and Maor Schreiber, are PhD students in Prof. Mudrik’s lab and have been playing a key role in shaping the course of the project and in designing the prediction maps for RPT, GNWT, and HOTs respectively. This required reading the relevant literature, cross-checking different works spanning decades of research, and extracting the structural claims of each theory while individuating their logical relationships with empirical predictions. Their expertise in practically building the predictions maps for the theories is an invaluable asset of this tutorial, since they can explain in detail how to translate a theory into a “prediction map”, as well as the specific challenges in doing so.

Desired educational expectations

In this tutorial, we plan to instruct the audience on how to approach theories of consciousness from a different angle. We expect participants to learn how to extract the crucial theoretical constructs of theories of consciousness, how they interact with various peripheral hypotheses, and how they are used to derive critical predictions. A further component of our framework is the distinction between different levels of periphery around the core. We expect attendees to learn how to assign meaning to each of these levels, and critically evaluate whether our proposed framework is the best way to represent theories of consciousness. Doing this helps determine the specific position each theoretical claim should take in the overall network. After this exercise, attendees will have all the key ingredients to build a prediction map for a given theory of consciousness. We believe this is a valuable result, as it pushes consciousness scholars to consider several questions that speak to both theoretical and empirical aspects of consciousness science, such as: what counts as a central claim of the theory, and which claims could instead be revised without major modifications to the overall theoretical structure? What is the logical relationship between theoretical claims? And what is the logical relationship between theoretical claims and empirical predictions?

This tutorial offers a novel tool to navigate these intricate issues.

Proposed audience engagement

In the tutorial, we will include an extensive interactive and dialogical component. We will reserve enough time for questions at the end of each presentation, and have two hands-on sessions in which participants will construct their own maps and analyze them. After presenting the philosophical foundations of our project, we will provide a step-by-step guide on how to build a prediction map for a theory of consciousness. After that, we will ask attendees to create a map for the theory of consciousness they are more familiar with. We will divide the room in groups, with each attendee joining the group working on their preferred theory (it is possible that there will be more groups working on the same theory). We will then ask each group to present their map. Participants will have the opportunity to share their thoughts on the map building process and on the specific challenges they faced.

The second hands-on section will involve participants computing various graph theory measures (e.g., centrality). Attendees will be instructed on how to compute centrality measures with Python, and will be able to do so in real time.

Planned structure

The tutorial will be divided into six sections, described in more details below:

Section 1

Introduction; 25 min (~20 + Q&A)

We will present the rationale of the project, why it is important for consciousness science, and its philosophical foundations.

Section 2

A recipe for prediction maps construction; 25 min (~20 + Q&A)

We will present how we practically built a prediction map, and we provide a step-by-step guide on how to do so.

Section 3

Participants practice and feedback; 1h

Attendees will be able to apply what they learnt in the previous section. They will work in groups to build a map of a theory of consciousness of their choice, and they will then share their results.

Section 4

Introduction to graph theory measures; 15 min (~10 min + Q&A)

We will give a brief overview of what graph theory measures are and why they are important in scoring the degree of influence of each claim for the overall theoretical network. Participants will be instructed on how to practically compute various measures.

Section 5

Participants practice on graph theory measures ;15 min

Attendees will be able to apply what they learnt about graph theory measures to a specific prediction map.

Section 6

Limitations, future directions, and general discussion; 30 min

We will examine some limitations of the current framework and we will offer some insights on how this research could develop and benefit consciousness science at large.

Rationale on panel inclusivity

Our research group is a diverse and inclusive team that brings together different expertise. Out of five members, three self-identify as males and two as females. The team includes Prof. Liad Mudrik, alongside one postdoctoral researcher and three PhD-level young researchers. We represent different cultural backgrounds, with one Italian member and four Israelis from various ethnicities. Academically, our group spans a broad range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and computational neuroscience. Such diversity has only strengthened the cohesiveness and efficiency of our team; in fact, approaching research questions from multiple perspectives has greatly enriched our collaborative work.

Summary

Machine Learning (ML) is getting widely used within the field of consciousness research. For example, it allowed classification of clinical cases, variant mental states, unconscious states during anesthesia, and diverse brain processes on transition to sleep.

Yet, specific challenges emerge when adopting ML in consciousness studies, due to the nature of data, experimental design and sample size. Improperly addressing these issues can lead to overestimation, misinterpretation and invalidation of findings. The goal of the tutorial is to provide explanations and techniques to mitigate these challenges, around three main axes:

1) Data-leakage: ML aims to predict outcomes in unseen data. If one evaluates models on the same data that the algorithm was trained on, this constitutes data-leakage. Practices which are common in cognitive science can lead to data-leakage, like whole-data processing (e.g. ICA during EEG cleaning) or choosing the wrong metric and performance estimation method (e.g. ROC-AUC using leave-one-out cross-validation).

2) Imbalanced Learning: ML relies on datapoint examples that span the entire outcome distribution. However, sometimes, different outcomes are unequally represented (e.g. decoding a rare mental state), leading to an imbalanced number of examples across outcomes.

3) Confounding: ML models can reveal associations between predictors and an outcome variable. Such associations are often attributed to the data’s nature and origin. However, there may be confounding variables (i.e. disregarded variables that correlate with both predictors and the outcome) that can drive the associations.

Additionally, we plan to offer guidelines to correctly interpret scientific findings obtained from ML models in consciousness research.

Rationale on speaker selection and proof of their expertise

The speakers were selected to comprise experts varying from cognitive neuroscience to computer science.

Dr. Raimondo is a computer scientist with published work in consciousness science using ML methods. Particularly, on the diagnosis of patients with Disorders of Consciousness from brain (Engemann et al. 2018) and bodily signals (Raimondo et al. 2017), responsiveness and sleep (Strauss et al. 2022), decoding of mental states during mind blanking (Mortaheb et al. 2022) and the characterization of its physiological states (Boulakis et al. 2024).

Dr. Nieto is a biomedical engineer with a PhD in neurophysiology. He has published on biases in ML models due to gender imbalance (Larrazabal et al. 2020) as well as leakage on data harmonization, imbalanced data and ML models (Nieto et al. 2024).

Dr. Wu is an electrical engineer with a PhD in medical sciences, centered in the study of brain-behavior relationships through neuroimaging and machine learning. She published on the challenges in brain-based prediction of behavior (Wu et al. 2023).

Dr. Patil leads the Applied Machine Learning group at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine-7: Brain and Behavior, where he bridges domain-agnostic ML models with cognitive and neuroimaging research, including publications on data-leakage (Sasse et al. 2024) and confounding (Hamdan et al. 2023).

MSc. Komeyer is a PhD candidate focusing on confounding variables in neuroimaging-based predictive models. Relevant work for this tutorial includes conceptual considerations regarding confounding variables in biomedicine (Komeyer, et al. 2024a) and causal inference using ML in precision medicine (Komeyer, et al. 2024b).

Desired educational expectations

This tutorial is intended for any researcher who uses (or is planning to use) ML in their research. There is no specific background and knowledge required, though in their own interest, it will be better if they understand what machine learning is and how it is typically applied. For this matter, prior to the tutorial, we will send reading material that could help attendees to get introduced to some of the key concepts. Nevertheless, we will also briefly introduce them in the first talk.

Proposed audience engagement

After the presentations, there will be a 1-hour slot in which the attendees will be able to present their projects and have a Q&A/discussion with the panel. During this section, participants will be able to introduce their projects, including presenting a few slides if needed, and proceed to discuss possible manners to overcome the project-specific challenges. The main goal is that attendees obtain applicable knowledge for their specific projects.

The structure of tutorial will be communicated to the attendees in advance, requesting the attendees to manifest their intentions and clearly define an agenda. At the end of the tutorial all materials and codes will be made publicly available and shared with the attendees, so they can use them in their research.

Planned structure

The tutorial will have two stages. The first stage consists of 4 presentations of 25 minutes each (including 5 minutes for questions), with two brief 10 minutes pauses after the second talk and the last talk.

The first talk will introduce general ML concepts that are required to understand and follow the rest of the tutorial. We will first introduce some examples of ML in consciousness science as well as key concepts and specific terminology used in the ML field.

The three following talks will address each one of the three challenges: Data-Leakage, Imbalanced Learning and Confounding. We will first introduce the problematics and challenges, including, when possible, examples on applications of ML to consciousness science. Each talk will also provide methods and tools that could be used to address these challenges and safely use ML within consciousness research.

In a second stage, we will hold a 1-hour interactive session in which the attendees, if they desire, can present their research projects or ask questions to the panel.

Rationale on panel inclusivity

This group of speakers is diverse in several factors. Regarding nationality, it is comprised by two South Americans (Argentina), two Asians (China and India) and a European (Germany). With respect to gender expression, two females and three males. In terms of career stage, by one PhD candidate, two post-doctoral researchers, a recently appointed team leader and an established group leader.

Summary

Disorders of consciousness (DoC) after severe brain injury are marked by impairments in arousal and/or awareness and affect millions of people worldwide. Advanced functional neuroimaging and electrophysiological (AIE) techniques have provided several new tools for improving both the diagnosis and prognosis in patients with DoC. This tutorial will introduce participants to recent advancements in AIE techniques, with an emphasis on data analysis, translating scientific approaches to clinic practices, and ethical/practical considerations. In this interactive tutorial, leaders from various disciplines will outline how multimodal AIE techniques can detect preserved consciousness and predict chances of recovery on an individualized patient basis. Using a case-based learning approach, we will provide a comprehensive overview of neuroimaging in DoC, the different technical approaches employed (i.e. fMRI, EEG, TMS-EEG, fNIRS, PET), the imaging paradigms used (active, passive, resting state) and the types of inferences that can be made based on those paradigms (e.g., perception, awareness, communication). Next, we will provide a hands-on tutorial on advancements in analysis techniques through interactive demonstrations on how to use and interpret publicly accessible pipelines for analyzing single-subject DoC data. Participants will observe a live TMS-EEG session, providing exposure to these techniques and an interactive discussion of the advantages and limitations of using AIEs with DoC patients. Finally, we will outline barriers in clinical translation (and discuss how these barriers might be overcome), and outline which patients stand to benefit the most from these neuroimaging techniques and consider when during their clinical trajectory imaging tests are likely to be most useful.

Rationale on speaker selection and proof of their expertise

This tutorial brings together a group of international experts throughout various career stages with a wide variety of expertise in different analytical methods for assessing brain function and behavioural responses in DoC patients. Dr. Karnig Kazazian, a junior research scientist at Western University, specializes in fMRI and fNIRS applications in clinical settings, co-leads the DoC neuroimaging program in London, Ontario, has advanced the use of fNIRS in DoC research and has published multiple peer-reviewed papers in DoC research. Dr. Aurore Thibaut is an internationally renowned expert in DoC research, the co-director of the Coma Science Group and an associate professor at the University of Liège, has published several seminal papers in DoC research, thereby establishing herself as a pioneer and world leader in imaging, behavioural assessments and therapeutics in DoC patients. Dr. Mario Rosanova is an associate professor at the University of Milan and a world expert in TMS-EEG. He has made significant contributions by applying these techniques to study brain activity in DoC, with multiple seminal contributions to the field of DoC and more broadly consciousness research as a whole. Dr. Marzia De Lucia is a scientist at Lausanne University hospital and combines machine learning with EEG to study DoC. Dr. De Lucia has pioneered novel analysis techniques to design prognostic models in DoC, has published several high impact publications and delivered numerous talks on using EEG with DoC patients. Together, these speakers provide a comprehensive and innovative perspective on AIE methods in DoC.

Desired educational expectations

This tutorial is designed to meet participants’ educational expectations by offering a structured, interactive learning experience across three sections. The introductory session will provide an educational foundation in the latest DoC research, covering neuroimaging and electrophysiological assessments and introducing paradigms like resting-state, passive, and active task-based approaches. Case-based demonstrations will allow participants to practically understand these paradigms, promoting an understanding of how different techniques apply to individual patient needs. Moving into practical application, participants will engage in hands-on demonstrations of data analysis techniques for EEG, PET, and fNIRS, gaining exposure to advanced machine learning methods and innovative analytical approaches relevant to DoC. Access to real data, code, and repositories will enable participants to follow along and practice, with structured guidance to reinforce their learning. Breakout groups will cater to specific interests, such as preferred imaging techniques, allowing for a tailored learning experience. A live TMS-EEG demonstration will provide direct observation of data collection and interpretation, ensuring that participants leave with a comprehensive and practical understanding of AIE applications in DoC. Finally, participants will gain insight into the barriers to clinical translation of advanced neuroimaging techniques in DoC and strategies to overcome them. They will also learn which patient populations benefit most from these techniques and when imaging tests are most useful during a patient's clinical trajectory.

Proposed audience engagement

We will engage the audience by combining interactive discussions, hands-on activities, and case-based learning throughout the tutorial. In the introductory session, participants will actively explore the clinical relevance of various consciousness assessment techniques through real-world case examples, promoting engagement with group polling software (such as Menti) and critical thinking by posing questions and scenerios to the audience which they can answer with anonymous polling. The hands-on demonstration of data analysis techniques for EEG, PET, and fNIRS will allow participants to work with actual data, fostering a deeper understanding of these methods. Interactive elements, such as breakout discussions with a tutorial leader will allow participants to tailor their learning to there preferred imaging techniques, which will also encourages networking with like-minded colleagues. Additionally, the live TMS-EEG demonstration will provide a dynamic opportunity for participants to observe data collection and analysis in real time, further enhancing their engagement and practical knowledge. Throughout the entire tutorial, questions and discussion prompts will be routinely provided to the audience to ensure engagement and interactive discussions.

Planned structure

This tutorial is organized into three sections, each blending theory with hands-on engagement to deepen understanding of AIE techniques in DoC. The introductory session will provide an overview of recent advancements in DoC research, focusing on neuroimaging and electrophysiological assessments and covering consciousness assessment paradigms such as resting-state, passive, and active task-based approaches. Through case-based demonstrations, we will illustrate how these paradigms are applied, allowing participants to explore the clinical relevance of each technique. A case-based approach will further guide discussion on selecting the most appropriate techniques and paradigms for individual patients, highlighting the importance of personalized assessment in DoC. Next, we will conduct a hands-on demonstration of various data analysis techniques, showcasing how EEG, PET, and fNIRS data can be effectively analyzed in the context of DoC. We will also discuss advancements in machine learning and cutting-edge analytical approaches used in this field. Participants will have access to data, code, and repositories for this session and will be guided step-by-step through the process, providing a practical and interactive experience to deepen their understanding. The session will be further enhanced using polls and time to break out into smaller groups with the tutorial leaders based on preference of imaging techniques. We will walk participants through interpreting EEG, PET, and BCI data, with hands-on guides allowing attendees to experiment with data processing and independently generate consciousness indices Finally, the hand-on demonstration offers a live TMS-EEG demonstration where participants can observe data collection and analysis firsthand.

Rationale on panel inclusivity

This tutorial honors diversity by thoughtfully selecting a panel inclusive of various scientific backgrounds, career stages, gender expressions, national origins, ethnicities, and LGBTQ+ representation. The speakers are balanced in gender, with two men and two women, and bring a range of career stages, from junior to senior researchers, fostering a breadth of perspectives. Geographic and ethnic diversity are also well-represented, with researchers from different regions and backgrounds. Dr. Karnig Kazazian, a junior researcher from Canada, brings an LGBTQ+ perspective and a Middle Eastern ethnic background, adding valuable insight into underrepresented communities in science. Dr. Aurore Thibaut, a senior female researcher, contributes deep expertise alongside Dr. Mario Rosanova, a senior male researcher, both offering advanced knowledge in the field. Dr. Marzia De Lucia, a mid-career researcher, bridges early-career and established expertise, providing a nuanced viewpoint on DoC. This carefully balanced panel celebrates diversity in all aspects, fostering an inclusive and comprehensive learning experience for all participants.

Summary

Bodily signals have a profound influence on cognition and brain activity, which has sparked growing interest in psychology and cognitive neuroscience to explore links between interoception, consciousness, and brain function. The present tutorial offers a comprehensive introduction on how to acquire, preprocess, and analyze signals from the heart, lungs, and stomach, emphasizing both conscious and unconscious effects on cognition. The first three talks address a specific visceral organ each. The heart session examines the influence of the cardiac cycle (systole and diastole) on perception and cognition, as well as how to study neural responses to heartbeats (heartbeat-evoked potentials) and their relationship with mental processes. The respiratory session explores how different breathing phases (inspiration and expiration) impact conscious perception and underlying brain activity. The stomach session introduces the electrogastrogram (EGG), a non-invasive technique to measure stomach activity and its effects on cognition, as well as methods to quantify the connectivity between the brain and the stomach. The final talk covers methods to assess conscious and unconscious perception of internal bodily sensations, including psychophysical and computational models for cardiac and respiratory interoception, as well as experience sampling approaches of broad bodily sensations. Each session features hands-on exercises centered on code examples in R and Matlab demonstrating the different analyses in practice, along with a dedicated Q&A session. By the end of the tutorial, participants will have gained essential tools to integrate the analysis of visceral signals into their own research.

Rationale on speaker selection and proof of their expertise

The selected speakers have a proven track record of significant contributions to brain-body research, coupled with a dedication to educational outreach evidenced through workshops and tutorials. Kluger has made significant contributions to understanding how respiration influences conscious perception and brain activity. Banellis has extensive experience with cardiac and gastric signals, interoception, consciousness research and mental health. Loescher is working on how cardiac, respiratory, and gastric signals influence perception in Tallon-Baudry's Lab. Rebollo's work has focused on how stomach signals influence brain dynamics and cognition.

Crucially, this team has a strong history of previous successful educational courses. Rebollo has performed over eight electrogastrography workshops at various conferences and labs. In the summer of 2024, Kluger, Banellis, and Rebollo conducted a similar workshop as part of the WAVES summer school, with the insights gained being applied in the proposed educational course. Banellis and Rebollo conducted a previous edition of this tutorial at the 26th edition of the ASSC in New York. With over 40 attendees, the workshop received highly positive feedback, underscoring the relevance of this topic for the ASSC community and the capacity of these speakers to attract and captivate a diverse audience. Importantly, the proposed tutorial is tailored specifically for ASSC-2025, with a refined focus on brain-body applications in consciousness research to meet the evolving interests of the community.

Desired educational expectations

This tutorial aims to equip participants with foundational skills for analyzing brain-body interactions, focusing on practical applications.

First, participants will obtain a conceptual understanding of the different ways in which bodily signals can influence perception, cognition, and brain activity. Second, attendees will gain concrete technical skills on how to acquire and preprocess physiological data from cardiac, gastric, and respiratory sources, along with methods to analyze brain-body interactions using EEG and fMRI. Participants will also learn how to assess explicit interoceptive awareness of these signals using different experimental tasks. Finally, we'll ensure attendees learn to apply these methods in their own research by i) providing extensive advice on troubleshooting common issues with data collection and analysis, ii) providing hands-on experience with data and code examples, and iii) extensive time for Q&A sessions.

By the end of this workshop, participants will understand the potential of brain-body interactions for cognitive neuroscience and consciousness research. Practical skills gained here will be applicable across various experimental settings, supporting a wide range of applications in neuroscience and beyond.

Proposed audience engagement

Our previous experience performing educational courses on bodily signals, including our highly successful edition of this course in the 26th edition of the ASSC, have led us to use the following methods of audience engagement.

Each of the four talks includes a hands-on analysis tutorial, in which participants are provided example data and code to perform basic and advanced brain-body interaction analysis. Materials will be available for download via a github repository ahead of the session.

Second, drawing from previous experience in similar workshops, we expect many participants to be early career researchers, some of which are already working on brain-body interactions and come to the workshop with prepared questions. Therefore, we have allocated substantial time for questions and answers.

Planned structure

The workshop is organized into four parts. Each part covers a different bodily signal (heart, stomach, and lungs) plus an additional session focusing on explicit measures of cardiac and respiratory interoception, as well as tools to quantify embodied mind-wandering. Each session consists of a talk introducing background physiology, acquisition, and analysis methods, followed by a practical coding session implementing different analysis steps. Each session also includes a dedicated Q&A segment, with a general Q&A session at the end of the workshop. A 10-minute break is scheduled between sessions 2 and 3.

A proposed time table (assuming a start at 9am) can be found below

- 09:00-09:35: Analyzing Brain-Lung Interactions. Daniel Kluger

- 09:35-09:40: Q&A

- 09:40-10:15: Analyzing Brain-Heart Interactions. Marie Loescher

- 10:15-10:20: Q&A

- 10:20-10:30: Break

- 10:30-11:05: Analyzing Brain-Stomach Interactions. Ignacio Rebollo

- 11:05-11-10: Q&A

- 11:10-11:45: Methods of Quantifying Conscious and Unconscious Perception of Bodily Signals. Leah Banellis

- 11:45-11:50: Q&A

- 11:50-12:00: General Q&A

Rationale on panel inclusivity

We propose an inclusive panel, with members representing different career stages, including an independent principal investigator, senior and junior postdoctoral researchers, and an advanced PhD student. It is composed of individuals from various nationalities (France, Germany, United Kingdom/Greece, Uruguay), ensuring diverse cultural perspectives. The panel is also gender-balanced and includes members of the LGBTQI+ community, and first-generation scientists. Scientifically, the members bring a wide range of expertise, covering different bodily signals and neuroimaging methods (fMRI, EEG, MEG), which effectively complement each other to provide a comprehensive exploration of the topic.

Summary

A pre-registered experiment is one for which hypotheses, analysis pipelines, and interpretations of results are all specified prior to data collection. By minimising analytic flexibility, the resulting research becomes more trustworthy and more likely to replicate. A trustworthy and replicable foundation of empirical research is essential for consciousness science to be successful, because without it we cannot build good theories. Enthusiasm for pre-registration is growing: a number of journals now award “badges” for pre-registered studies and a growing number of funders are encouraging applicants to adopt such methods. However, writing a pre-registration that both specifies an appropriate analysis pipeline and successfully constrains analysis choices is difficult - indeed many are inadequate and/or poorly followed - so researchers may benefit from explicit training in these methods.

This tutorial is designed for empirical researchers at all career stages. We will guide participants through the process of writing an effective yet concise pre-registration, covering topics such as how to make pre-processing choices, how to estimate effect sizes, and how to anticipate problems with the dataset. We will also discuss tips for pre-registering more complex analyses, including neuroimaging and computational research. The tutorial will be highly interactive – participants will work in small, discipline-specific groups to design research plans together, gaining hands-on experience in writing pre-registrations in their area of expertise. By the end, we hope to equip researchers with the skills necessary to create thorough pre-registrations, ultimately enhancing the credibility and rigour of scientific research.

Rationale on speaker selection and proof of their expertise

Zoltan Dienes is at the forefront of open science, pre-registration and registered reports. He has published widely on metascience (e.g. [1-3]) and statistical best practice in psychological research, with particular emphasis on Bayes Factors (e.g. [4-5]). In 2013 he joined the first Registered Reports editorial team at Cortex. He also spearheaded the introduction of registered reports to the ASSC journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, acting as associate editor for registered reports submissions until 2024. He is a founding member of Peer Community In Registered Reports (PCI-RR) and sits on the managing board.

Maxine Sherman has pre-registered all of her empirical work since starting her first postdoctoral position and now has extensive hands-on experience in pre-registration of consciousness research, including for projects using psychophysics, neuroimaging, computational modelling, questionnaire measures, and machine learning. She is a recommender (editor) for PCI Registered Reports.

Proof:

Zoltan Dienes

- https://rr.peercommunityin.org/public/user_public_page?userId=5

- https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=1n48dTUAAAAJ&hl=en

Maxine Sherman

- https://rr.peercommunityin.org/public/user_public_page?userId=2007

- https://osf.io/yn3r7/

Desired educational expectations

1. To understand the information that needs to be present in a pre-registration

2. To understand how to design effective analysis plans prior to seeing the data

3. To be able to successfully identify all sources of analytic flexibility

4. To be equipped with strategies for planning complex analyses, e.g. on neuroimaging data

5. To be equipped with strategies for dealing with unexpected results

6. To gain experience writing an effective pre-registration

Proposed audience engagement

After participants sign up for the tutorial we will ask them to fill out a very brief survey that asks about the kinds of techniques they would like to pre-register (e.g. reaction time studies, psychophysics, physiological recordings, EEG, fMRI, computational modelling). We will use this information to allocate participants into technique-specific small groups. Audience participation will be central throughout the tutorial: as well as discussing topics altogether, in all sections of the session the small groups will work together on guided exercises centered around each key component of a pre-registration. At the end of each exercise another component of the pre-registration will have been planned. By the end of the session, each small group will have designed a full pre-registration for a hypothetical (or actual) study in their domain.

Planned structure

The tutorial will be split into multiple sections (with a break half-way), each addressing a different component of a pre-registration. Sections will begin with an introduction and tips and tricks for how to write that component. Participants will then work through exercises in their small groups and. Finally, will whole-group discussions will reflect on elements that were challenging, how decisions were made and issues that were identified.

The structure will be as follows:

1) Introduction

2) Designing a strong analysis plan

We will work through how to commit to answers to the following questions:

- What does my theory predict?

- What manipulation checks do I need to conduct?

- What will my data look like and what statistical model should I use?

- What patterns of results might I find and how would I interpret them?

3) Effect sizes, power, priors and nulls

Here we will cover:

- How to estimate effect sizes and minimum effects of interest

- How to determine sample size

- How to assert the null

4) Data Preprocessing & Anticipating problems

Anticipating problems is arguably the most important part of writing an effective pre-registration because there is substantial analytical flexibility in how data are preprocessed and/or excluded. This section will cover:

- How to anticipate and deal with issues such as poor task performance, failed manipulation checks, and issues specific to neuroimaging/psychophysiology/modelling.

- Exclusion and inclusion criteria

- Preprocessing choices

5) Conclusions

Rationale on panel inclusivity

The panel is balanced across gender and career stage but not across ethnicity, disability, socioeconomic class or other factors. This would be difficult to achieve with only two panelists, but we hope to be able to expand the session in future years.

The theme of the tutorial honours diversity because open, transparent science is more democratic. A democratic scientific system encourages diversity by virtue of the fact that it counters academic oligarchy [see 3].

References

[1] Schumann, F., Smolka, M., Dienes, Z., Lübbert, A., Lukas, W., Rees, M. G., ... & Van Vugt, M. (2023). Beyond kindness: a proposal for the flourishing of science and scientists alike. Royal Society Open Science, 10(11), 230728.

[2] Dienes, Z. (2024). The inner workings of Registered Reports. In Austin Lee Nichols & John E. Edlund (Eds), Cambridge Handbook of Research Methods and Statistics for the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Volume 2

[3] Dienes, Z. (2023). The credibility crisis and democratic governance: How to reform university governance to be compatible with the nature of science. Royal Society Open Science, 10(1), 220808.

[4] Catriona, S., Dienes, Z., & Wonnacott, E. (2024). Bayes factors for logistic (mixed effect) models. Psychological Methods.

[5] Dienes, Z. (2023). Testing theories with Bayes factors. In Austin Lee Nichols & John E. Edlund (Eds), Cambridge Handbook of Research Methods and Statistics for the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Summary

The search for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) remains a core focus of the neuroscience of consciousness. State-NCC, defining the neural mechanisms underlying global, non-specific-states of consciousness, have been traditionally investigated by means of contrastive paradigms centered around physiological (e.g. sleep), pharmacological (e.g. anesthesia) and pathological (e.g. disorders of consciousness) states of consciousness. More recently, within-state paradigms have also been proposed.

In this tutorial, we will feature didactical talks from an interdisciplinary team of experts, followed by a collective debate session. In the talks, we will first introduce the concept of global states of consciousness and provide a rationale for their study. Secondly, we will delve into study designs and experimental paradigms suitable for investigations based on sleep, anesthesia and disorders of consciousness. Opportunities and challenges associated with the study of each class of states of consciousness will be critically discussed. In the debate, we will discuss with all speakers about synergistically integrating findings from -physiologically and phenomenologically- different states of consciousness and about the possibility to bridge the gap between the often-segregated fields of states vs. contents of consciousness.

List of talks:

- Global states of consciousness: conception and misconceptions, Andy McKilliam

- Why global states of consciousness matter? Understanding the neural mechanisms of conscious contents, Georg Northoff

- Sleep, anesthesia and disorders of consciousness: a comparative introduction, Benedetta Cecconi

- Capturing neural signatures of consciousness in sleep, Francesca Siclari

- Capturing neural signatures of consciousness in anesthesia, Anthony Hudetz

- Capturing neural signatures of consciousness in disorders of consciousness, Melanie Boly

Rationale on speaker selection and proof of their expertise

The speakers are recognized experts in the field of consciousness research. Each speaker is a lead author in several experimental and/or philosophical works published in peer-reviewed journals and tackling specifically the topic of their talk.

Desired educational expectations

By the end of this tutorial, participants will gain a robust understanding of advantages and limitations of investigating the neural correlates of consciousness based on different global states of consciousness, namely sleep, anesthesia and disorders of consciousness. They will also learn about best practices (study designs, choice of experimental paradigms) and open questions in state-based investigations.

With the debate session, they will learn to critically posit findings on physiological, pharmacological and pathological states of consciousness into the broader framework of the neuroscience of consciousness.

Proposed audience engagement

The audience will be encouraged to actively participate throughout the tutorial and extensively during the debate session. While the start of the debate session will be structured to revolve around three key questions (see below), the participants will be strongly encouraged to push the discussion forward with thought-provoking comments and questions. The audience will be given a chance to either interact directly with the panel of speakers or to ask questions anonymously on an accessible online platform (e.g. Slido), which also allows to democratically upvote questions of interest.

Hands-out materials for each talk will be made freely available at the end of the tutorial.

Planned structure

The tutorial will be organized in two parts, with a series of talks (2 hours) followed by an interactive debate (1 hour).

The talks (2 hours) will:

(1) introduce the concept of global states of consciousness

(2) provide a rationale for studying global states of consciousness

(3) explain how we can (and should) design studies and experimental paradigms revolving around the different states of consciousness (sleep, anesthesia, disorders of consciousness) and how these can inform the science of consciousness.

The debate (1 hour), with all speakers, will revolve around fundamental questions, such as:

(1) can we identify a unique set of neural correlates of consciousness starting from the study of physiologically and possibly phenomenologically different states of consciousness?

(2) how can we integrate findings from different states of consciousness?

(3) how can we integrate research on global states of consciousness and on conscious content?

Rationale on panel inclusivity

The tutorial aims to bring together leaders across different disciplines (philosophy, neuroscience, neurology, anesthesiology), countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, USA, Taiwan), and career stages (senior: Boly, Hudetz, Northoff, Siclari, mid-career: Sala, early: Cecconi, Mckilliam) to foster a dynamic discussion with conference attendees. The gender ratio across presenters and chairs is 3 men to 4 women

After a brief synthetic introduction to the GNW theoretical framework, I will address findings, questions and hypotheses related to the following three main topics: conscious access, conscious states and conscious stream. What is conscious access (and what it is not)? When and where does it occur in the brain? Are there neural signatures common to all conscious states ? What is the minimal core size of a GNW ? Could conscious stream be structured as a (non-dualistic) ‘Inner Cinema’ beyond the limited case of perception? In other words, could conscious stream be structured as a succession of discrete moments interspersed with brief non-conscious periods that are transformed into a subjective experience of continuity through a high-level filling-in and kinematic process? This journey into cognitive neuroscience of consciousness will include a substantial neurological ‘detour’ into various severe Disorders of Consciousness (DoC) encompassing epilepsy, but it will also touch on hypnosis, functional neurological disorders, sleep, mind wandering and mind blanking.

The concept of the Reflective Nexus offers a developmental account of how consciousness, metacognition, and theory of mind are intrinsically interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Rather than treating metacognition and theory of mind as isolated, domain-specific, or late-emerging abilities, I argue that they are best understood as developmental expressions of consciousness itself—its self-reflective and other-reflective dimensions, respectively, as they unfold over time. The Reflective Nexus is introduced as a novel theoretical construct proposed within the framework of a new, unified, and recursive model of cognitive development. This integrative model synthesizes elements from three foundational theories—Developmental Priorities Theory, which maps the evolving interplay between executive functions, reasoning and intelligence; Representational Redescription, which explains how implicit forms of knowledge are progressively transformed into explicit, flexible, and manipulable representations; and the Global Workspace Model, which views consciousness as a dynamic hub for global cognitive coordination and integration. Within this view, consciousness functions as a developmental interface —a regulatory and representational medium through which cognitive processes are continually reorganized across time. As children mature, consciousness supports the transition from context-bound, procedural learning to increasingly explicit, generalized, and flexible representations of both self and others. Metacognition operates as a higher-order regulatory process, while theory of mind reflects the intersubjective extension of reflective awareness into the social domain. By framing metacognition and theory of mind as processes that both shape and are shaped by consciousness, the Reflective Nexus clarifies cognitive development as a dynamic, recursive process governed by the organization and refinement of reflective awareness.

Hallucinations, considered manifestations of altered consciousness, occur when normal sensory processing is disrupted, as seen in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Minor hallucinations (MH), such as presence hallucinations and misperceptions, affect 50-60% of PD patients early on, and are a major risk factor for cognitive decline and dementia (Aarsland et al., 2021). However, the neuropsychological correlates of MH in PD remain unclear. Many studies fail to link MH to cognitive deficits, as patients with MH show similar cognitive performance to those without hallucinations (Bejr‐kasem et al., 2019). Using a neurotechnological approach (Bernasconi et al., 2022), we investigated whether specific cognitive deficits are associated with robot-induced MH, namely presence hallucinations (PH), the convincing sensation that a human presence is nearby when no one is here. Twenty-five PD patients with MH (PD-MH) and 25 without hallucinations (PD-nH) underwent neuropsychological assessments and a robotic procedure that induces PH. Our results show that PD-MH patients are more sensitive to the robotic procedure than PD-nH patients, supporting previous findings. While both groups performed similarly in neuropsychological tests, PD-MH patients reported significantly more subjective cognitive decline. Critically, we found a significant association between increased sensitivity to the robotic procedure (inducing hallucinations) and poorer performance in frontal-subcortical cognitive functions (associated with altered aspects of consciousness, mainly in attention, executive control), particularly in PD-MH patients. These findings suggest that when sensitivity to robot-induced hallucinations is considered, a more detailed link between cognitive decline and hallucinations emerges, providing early detection of PD progression not captured by current methods in clinical practice.

Introduction: Many different brain regions have been implicated in auditory hallucinations leading to divergent theories regarding their cause. Lesion-induced cases of auditory hallucinations can help identify brain structures that are causal rather than correlated.

Methods: We completed a systematic literature review of lesions associated with new onset pure auditory hallucinations without other psychotic features. Lesion locations were mapped for their functional connectivity from a large, resting-state connectome (n=1000). Lesion network maps associated with auditory hallucinations were compared on voxelwise two-sample T-test to controls and to each other based on phenotype.

Results: Most lesional causes of pure auditory hallucinations were of music (54%) and associated with hearing loss. We did not identify any cases of verbal, lesion-induced hallucinations without other psychotic features. Peak positive connections in our musical hallucination network were in early auditory centers (cochlear, superior olivary and trapezoid nuclei) with anti-correlations in higher auditory processing regions (superior temporal lobe, medial geniculate body). When contrasted, musical hallucinations had peaks in rhythm generation centers (supplementary motor area) while vocal hallucinations mapped to memory locations (hippocampi).

Conclusions: Musical hallucinations were the most common semiology of lesional auditory hallucinations despite the fact that verbal hallucinations are far more common in psychiatric disorders. Lesions causing pure auditory hallucinations demonstrate connections to lower and higher order auditory processing regions which fits hallucination theories focused on disconnection of bottom-up and top-down processing. Auditory hallucinations with delusions better fit memory intrusion models. Phenomenology could clarify how competing theories of hallucinations differentially explain semiologically distinct hallucinatory disorders.

Simple visual hallucinations are characterised by colourful geometric patterns that are reported across distinct aetiologies, including stroboscopic stimulation, suggesting shared underlying neural mechanisms. To characterise the content of these hallucinations, we conducted an analysis using a unsupervised machine learning image clustering approach on a large dataset comprising over 10,000 drawings that were created by participants in response to an invitation to visually describe their experiences in the Dreamachine — an immersive multisensory experience (developed by Collective Act) that combined strobe lighting and 360-degree spatial sound to induce hallucination-like experiences (and other altered states of consciousness) in nearly 40,000 participants (https://dreamachine.world/).

Using DINOv2—a pre-trained, vision transformer—to extract visual features, and k‑means clustering to partition the drawings, we found that 38 clusters best captured the geometries in the dataset, as validated by the average silhouette score, a measure of the clustering quality. The clusters confirmed and extended previous findings, notably identifying all four Klüver form constants as separate clusters.

We identified four dimensions of visual content describing the geometries within the clusters: Global Geometry, Curvature, Polar Geometry, and Rotational Polar Form Symmetry. Our analysis revealed a subset of clusters dominated by a 4‑fold rotational symmetry (accounting for over 5% of drawings) as well as clusters defined by non‑Klüver forms (e.g., amorphous, uniform/mix of colours, miscellaneous geometries, and semantic content). Together, our findings expand the description of stroboscopically induced simple visual hallucinations, and encourage the development of more sophisticated computational models that can elucidate their neural mechanisms.

Divergent perception is the atypical experience of sensory information, which includes simple (e.g., geometric patterns, colors) and complex visual hallucinations (meaningful objects and environments). Complex hallucinations are a hallmark symptom of psychiatric disorder, but recent research has found they can also be induced in the healthy population using a technique called Ganzflicker – a rhythmic flickering of colors on a computer screen. This work suggests there may be common cognitive mechanisms of complex hallucinations that can be explored in the healthy population. In the current study, we explored the predictive role of three evidence-based factors in complex hallucination proneness: previous anomalous experiences (e.g., seeing ghosts), schizotypal traits (i.e., schizophrenia-like traits found in the general population), and mental imagery vividness (i.e., the ability to mentally simulate visual sensory information in the “mind’s eye”). 142 participants completed the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ; mental imagery measure), the Creative Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ; schizotypy measure), and reported any prior anomalous experiences. They then underwent 10 minutes of Ganzflicker stimulation, and afterwards reported the contents of hallucinations experienced in that time, both simple and complex. VVIQ, CEQ, and prior anomalous experience (yes/no) were added as predictors in a logistic regression with hallucination complexity (simple, complex) as the outcome variable. Results showed that more vivid imagery, higher schizotypal traits, and prior anomalous experience all contributed to a higher likelihood of complex Ganzflicker hallucinations. This research aligns with a recent model of divergent perception and has implications for understanding hallucination susceptibility in diverse populations.

Aberrant perceptions, such as hallucinations, are a predominant non-motor symptom in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and have often been attributed to dopaminergic treatments that are systematically used to improve the motor symptoms of the disease. While clinical wisdom suggests a strong association between dopaminergic medication and hallucinations, empirical data do not clearly support this regard, and the cortical and subcortical mechanisms by which dopamine putatively lead to hallucinations remain unresolved. This is because hallucinations are challenging to study under controlled experimental settings. To circumvent those limitations we developed a method and procedure inducing clinically relevant hallucinations in PD. Here, to provide evidence on whether dopaminergic treatments are associated with hallucinations we tested patients with PD under On (i.e. usual intake) and Off (i.e. medication withdraw) dopaminergic medications, while performing our sensorimotor robotic procedure inducing presence hallucinations, and recorded resting-state fMRI under both medications conditions. Our results show that i) presence hallucinations in PD are induced through conflicting sensorimotor stimulation, and ii) dopaminergic medications facilitate the occurrence of those hallucinations. Moreover, iii) partial least squares fMRI analysis associated the increased sensitivity to experience those hallucinations in the On conditions with a higher functional connectivity within the dorsal striatum and between the dorsal striatum and prefrontal-premotor regions. Collectively, these results present conclusive experimental-clinical evidence that dopamine favors (sensorimotor) hallucinations occurrence, and provide direct evidence of the involvement of subcortical and cortical structures in hallucinations, thereby suggesting a subcortical-cortical view of the neural correlates of (aberrant) perception.

Hallucinations in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) have been linked to dopaminergic medication, yet this association is still debated (Ravina et al, 2007). Our group developed a robotic setup to induce presence hallucinations (robot-induced presence hallucinations, riPH), enabling the controlled investigation of hallucination susceptibility. Recent work has showed increased riPH sensitivity in PD patients during dopaminergic treatment (Bernasconi & Stampacchia, in prep.). The present study investigates how dopaminergic medication modulates functional connectivity (FC) fingerprints (Stampacchia et al., 2024) and their relationship with riPH sensitivity.

Twenty PD patients underwent resting-state fMRI and the robot experiment in ON- and OFF-medication state. riPH sensitivity was quantified for each individual using a delay-dependent response probability. We estimated individual’s identifiability based on FC matrices within and across medication states (ON vs. OFF). Edgewise intra-class correlation (ICC) assessed topographic features of FC fingerprints within and across medication states. A linear mixed model tested whether high-ICC FC edges and medication state predicted riPH sensitivity, adjusting for age, sex, and disease duration.

Individual FC profiles were highly identifiable within sessions (IDiff ON=0.36, OFF=0.35; 100% success), but cross-medication comparisons reduced subjects’ identifiability (IDiff=0.17-0.21; 98-99% success). ON-medication increased ICC in visual, somatomotor, salience, subcortical, and cerebellar networks (FDR-corrected). High-ICC FC (β=16.41, p=0.041) and medication state (β=67.52, p=0.017) predicted riPH sensitivity, with an interaction indicating altered effects OFF-medication (β=-28.32, p=0.018).

Dopaminergic medication reconfigures FC fingerprints in PD, stabilizing sensorimotor and salience networks and modulating hallucination sensitivity. These findings advance understanding of individual connectomes in PD, and the association between dopaminergic treatment and hallucinations.

Background. Patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) typically hold aberrant beliefs about their body that they struggle to update. These can vary from sensory, local beliefs about how full their stomach feels to global, prospective beliefs about how much they can trust their own body. Questionnaire studies revealed the role of such beliefs in the onset, maintenance, and treatment of AN, yet the parameters that contribute to their formation and maintenance remain unknown.

Aims and Methods: I present two studies with independent samples at the acute (total N = 106) and post-acute AN state (N = 113), compared to matched healthy controls (N = 220) that aimed to: (1) assess interoceptive and exteroceptive perception and metacognition using state-of-the-art methods and statistical approaches such as the Heart Rate Discrimination Task (Legrand et al., 2022; M ratio analyses); (2) develop and validate a novel neurocomputational approach using a Bayesian Learning Framework to determine the parameters that may influence explicit belief formation and updating; (4) relate some of these parameters to clinical symptoms such as insight into illness, using measures validated specifically in eating disorders.

Results and Conclusions. AN patients showed lower precision-weighted, learning rates than controls in both retrospective and prospective belief updating across domains. However, exteroceptive and interoceptive metacognition, and key, latent parameters of belief updating, predicted different disruptions of clinical insight; exteroceptive, local belief updating difficulties were linked with unrealistic body image beliefs, while difficulties in interoceptive metacognition predicted global insight difficulties.

Social neuroscience has studied interpersonal dynamics using neural and behavioral synchrony markers (Schilbach & Redcay, 2024). The 5E cognition approach (Embodied, Enactive, Extended, Embedded, and Ecological) - historically called generative neurophenomenology approach (Varela, 1999; Monnier et al., forthcoming, 2025) links bodies synchrony with lived experiences of “interbeing”, such as empathy and togetherness (Troncoso et al., 2023). Applied to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), these dimensions help explain atypical social interactions, particularly through the interpersonal misalignment model (Bolis et al., 2022). However, these aspects remain underexplored together, especially with autistic children.

This study simultaneously collects and analyzes the dynamics of neural, cardiac, motor, and subjective synchronies on 80 Mother-Child dyads during cooperation tasks, including 40 verbal ASD children. Electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) measure simultaneous activity in a hyperscanning setup, while cameras capture motor synchrony. The "Inclusion of Other in the Self" scale (Aron & Aron, 1992) assesses perceived togetherness after each activity. Body maps and microphenomenology interviews provide additional qualitative data on lived experiences.

Initial results from a pilot study of 10 dyads reveal correlations between interbrain synchrony and sense of togetherness. We explore alpha-mu rhythm desynchronization (8-12 Hz) in the right temporoparietal junction as a marker distinguishing ASD from neurotypical children. Motor coordination differences are investigated to predict interbrain synchrony and the level of shared experiences.

This project fundamentally aims to characterize the dynamics of physiological and subjective experiences in social interaction. Clinically, it challenges the deficit-based view of autism, by offering unique multimodal interpersonal data and a reusable Python toolbox.

The term Peripersonal Space (PPS) defines as the space immediatelly sorrounding the body, where the body can physically interact with stimuli in the external enviroment. In this context, PPS has been described in multiple ways, including reaching space, defensive space, interpersonal space, action fields, and contact prediction mechanisms, or the “space of the self”. Here I will to discuss the fundamental nature of PPS as a neural representation integrating tactile inputs from the body with external cues that have the potential to contact the body —i.e., stimuli within near space. In this context, while PPS has traditionally been framed in spatial terms, I propose that its core function extends beyond spatial computations. Instead, PPS encodes the contingencies between bodily and external stimuli in both space and time. This shift in perspective suggests that PPS should be reconceptualized as Peripersonal Space-Time (PPST). In this context, PPST grounds a basic representation underrlying self-consciousness “here and now”. While direct empirical validation of this hypothesis is still forthcoming—experiments are currently ongoing —there is substantial indirect evidence supporting this framework. I will outline a roadmap for future research to assess and refine this proposal.

The sense of agency (SoA)—the experience of controlling one’s actions and their effects—is essential to consciousness. Traditional SoA studies rely on explicit responses, limiting assessment in those unable to provide feedback, such as infants, non-verbal individuals, and artificial systems.

We propose that active causal inference of one's causal power serves as a behavioral signature of SoA. Our study examined how individuals infer their causal power through structured action. Using transformer-LSTM-based deep neural networks, we quantify the connection between active inference behaviors and SoA.

We conducted control detection and judgment tasks with adults, children, and individuals with schizophrenia, who used a mouse or touchpad to manipulate visual stimuli. We analyzed movement trajectories using deep neural networks to quantify action plans and examined how action plan diversity related to control detection accuracy.

Findings indicate that action plan diversity systematically increases with perceived control, reflecting an active exploratory strategy for accumulating causal evidence. In adults, action plan geometry predicted behavioral responses in two control tasks, confirming the role of actively structured action policies in agency computations. In children, action plan diversity correlated with developmental improvements in agency perception. Individuals with schizophrenia exhibited reduced action plan diversity and impaired agency inference, indicating limited capacity for causal evidence gathering.

Our research demonstrates that active causal inference plays a crucial role in SoA. We argue that it serves as a signature of SoA. By observing active causal inference behavior without requiring explicit reports, our study can potentially establish the first no-report paradigm for objectively assessing SoA.

The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is an important paradigm in consciousness research, offering insights into how the brain constructs a coherent sense of body ownership and self-awareness. To investigate the integration of multimodal sensory information and the brain’s ability to form a unified self-representation, we developed a neuro-computational model that mimics the role of the parietal cortex in the RHI experiment.

Our multisensory integration network learns the joint distribution of sensory inputs by observing different arm positions through proprioception and vision, encoded in separate populations that converge upon a multisensory population with recurrent connections to an inhibitory population. Unlike previous models, our approach leverages purely local Hebbian learning to achieve human-like multisensory integration. Under normal conditions, our network achieves Bayesian-optimal decoding accuracy of true arm positions. In the RHI condition, we observe a proprioceptive drift pattern similar to human behavior: for low sensory disparities (<25°), the model fuses both inputs, leading to intermittent arm position estimates. For higher disparities, the model exhibits a winner-takes-all behavior, where the more reliable input dominates the sensory estimate. Thus, our model generalizes to out-of-distribution inputs, demonstrating human-like patterns of proprioceptive drift consistent with Bayesian causal inference as observed in human data. Additionally, we validated our model in a robot-hand illusion experiment using an iCub robot, demonstrating that robots can develop a body schema purely through unsupervised sensory learning. Our model provides a mechanistic explanation of how flexible body ownership emerges and offers a computational foundation for consciousness grounded in bodily experiences.

The embodied experience of emotion has been discussed for centuries (James,1884; Schachter & Singer, 1962), with some describing the perception and interpretation of interoceptive bodily sensations as integral for emotion. This translates in dysfunctional mental health cases where bodily processes are often misrepresented. This visceral misrepresentation influences affective processes through both conscious and unconscious pathways.

Therefore, I will present findings from a variety of methods which capture both conscious and unconscious bodily influences on mental health and affective experiences. This will include psychophysical tasks of assessing cardiac and respiratory interoception, multidimensional interoceptive experience sampling of embodied thoughts, and methods which assess implicit interoception such as via electrophysiological coupling between neural and visceral rhythms.

We observe distinct mental health relationships between objective and subjective perception of interoceptive signals. Specifically, dysfunctional interoception in mental health symptoms may demonstrate more predominantly in conscious subjective experiences rather than objective sensing of interoceptive signals. This is demonstrated with broad mental health associations with both subjective survey and experience sampling methods of assessing interoception, but not with interoceptive task performance measures. In addition to complex conscious interoceptive influences on mental health, we also observe unconscious contributions of interoception (i.e., stomach-brain coupling) with multidimensional symptoms of mental health.

These findings highlight the multifaceted and complex role of interoception in mental health, emphasising the importance of capturing broad conscious and unconscious interoceptive processing. Relying solely on performance-based tasks risks overlooking critical interoceptive contributions from subjective and implicit measures, essential for a comprehensive understanding of interoception on mental health.

Sense of time is one of the most fundamental aspects of human consciousness. We present two studies that, for the first time, reveal the neural mechanisms underlying the influence of the heart on duration perception using electroencephalography (EEG), testing if and how the subjective experience of time arises from an intricate brain-heart interplay.

The EEG studies utilised our behavioural findings showing that perceived stimulus duration was distorted by autonomic signals arising from the heart, and that this temporal distortion was modulated by experienced arousal (Arslanova et al., 2023 Current biology). The first EEG study examined the neural correlates of temporal distortions when cardiac signals impacted emotionally neutral stimuli (i.e., participants judged the duration of visual Gabor patches), whereas the second EEG study focused on cardiac effects on duration perception under different levels of experienced arousal (i.e., participants judge the duration of faces showing neutral of fearful expression).

The first EEG study (N = 41) showed that cardiac signalling suppressed later stages of visual processing, which was correlated with contraction of perceived durations. The second EEG study (N = 48) revealed distinct mechanisms by which arousal and cardiac signals shape subjective duration perception – an early modulation by arousal, followed by a later modulation by cardiac signal.

Our results reveal how cardiac signals shape conscious experience by exerting top-down attenuation of sensory processing, how time may be intrinsic to sensory response, and how affective context drives the effect of the heart on our sense of time.

Over recent years, the critical role of body-brain interactions in the emergence of consciousness has gained increasing recognition. In this context, brain-heart interactions have been proposed as potential biomarkers of consciousness levels, with Heartbeat-Evoked Responses (HERs)—neural responses to heartbeat—being linked to perceptual consciousness, bodily self-awareness, and the presence of residual consciousness in brain-injured patients (1). HERs have been primarily studied using scalp EEG during wakefulness, where they have been associated with a widespread network of cortical regions (2). However, their dynamics during altered states of consciousness, such as sleep, remain largely unexplored. Additionally, the lack of standardized methodologies to distinguish HERs from cardiac-related artifacts has hindered our understanding of their underlying network (3).

Here, we investigate HERs across vigilance states using intracranial EEG (SEEG). This approach offers unmatched temporal and spatial resolution, enabling a more precise characterization of the neuronal response to heartbeat and its underlying network. We analyzed intracranial recordings from N = 10 epileptic patients undergoing SEEG for presurgical evaluation. HERs were extracted during wakefulness and sleep stages (N2, N3, and REM) by averaging peristimulus epochs time-locked to the R-peak of the heartbeat. Our results reveal that HERs are consistently present across all vigilance states, with the insula emerging as a key neural source of this evoked potential. These findings highlight the critical role of the insula in cardiac signal processing and advance our understanding of brain-heart interactions across different states of consciousness.

1: Candia-Rivera (2022).

2: Mazzola et al (2023).

3: Park & Blanke (2019).

Many automatic processes seem to escape conscious control. A well-known example is Stroop interference, in which the automatic reading response slows participants when they name the color of a word incongruent with its meaning (e.g., blue written in red). Interestingly, highly suggestible individuals can abolish this effect when given a hypnotic suggestion that they can no longer read (the word blindness effect). According to Cold Control Theory (CCT), the ability to suppress reading is not exclusive to highly suggestible people. It claims that anyone can voluntarily control automatic processes without hypnotic suggestions, as long as they are motivated and believe they can. Instead, CCT explains the differences between highly and lowly suggestible individuals as arising from metacognitive skills, where highly hypnotizable lack metacognitive insight into their intention to act in accordance with suggestions.

Here, we tested these claims. We investigated whether a voluntary word blindness strategy can reduce Stroop interference without hypnosis and whether this reduction is independent of suggestibility, as proposed by CCT. Additionally, we examined whether suggestibility can be explained by metacognitive insight into the intention to act. We tested 170 participants, measuring their suggestibility, their ability to reduce Stroop interference using the voluntary word blindness strategy, and their metacognitive efficiency in a visuomotor control task. Consistent with CCT, we show that individuals can slightly reduce Stroop interference voluntarily, regardless of their suggestibility. However, contrary to CCT, metacognitive efficiency did not predict suggestibility. These findings challenge CCT's assumptions and provide new insights into voluntary control over automatic processes.

The question "What is a self-generated action?" has sparked fruitful debates and inspired promising definitions in the field. Notably, Schuur and Haggard propose defining it as the motor consequence of integrating a range of different types of inputs. While we agree that this definition is insightful, we believe it overlooks an important element: the nature of the inputs (exogenous vs. endogenous). Specifically, we suggest that actions relying more on endogenous inputs are more self-generated compared to actions relying more on exogenous inputs.

Our study explores how the quantity and nature of inputs (exogenous vs. endogenous) influence markers of volition in decision-making, using a Random Dot Kinematic (RDK) task. In this pre-registered EEG study, we recruited 39 participants who judged the direction of RDK stimuli across four conditions. We systematically manipulated the quantity of inputs across four levels: Instructed (one possible choice of direction), Semi-Instructed (four possible choices), Free (eight possible choices), and Recommended (eight possible choices with an exogenous recommendation). Simultaneously, we varied the nature of inputs, from Instructed (exogenous decision-making) to Semi-Instructed/Free (endogenous decision-making), and Recommended (a mix of endogenous and exogenous decision-making).

We used a combination of markers, including self-reported volition, temporal binding, and readiness potential, as both subjective and implicit indicators of volition. Our results show that the nature of inputs (exogenous vs. endogenous) had a greater influence on volitional markers than the quantity of inputs. This study provides novel insights into the interplay between input characteristics and volition, offering a refined framework for understanding self-generated actions.

Recent theories propose that consciousness evolved as part of the episodic memory system, suggesting conscious experience might be a product of episodic memory formation. This adds an important perspective to consciousness science, yet the field remains fragmented with competing, largely disconnected theories. In this work, we provide a unified account of three accounts of consciousness: episodic memory, predictive processing, and Integrated Information Theory (IIT). Specifically, we propose that consciousness emerges from the mechanism through which the brain segments continuous sensory data into discrete events and encodes them into episodic memory. This mechanism is driven by points of high Bayesian surprise, which we demonstrate mathematically correspond to peaks in integrated information (φ). This segmentation not only creates our memories but may generate our subjective experience of the present – providing a formal bridge between episodic memory formation, event cognition, and well-tested theories of consciousness. Our theory generates testable predictions: (1) temporal alignment between event boundaries in memory, peaks in φ, and subjective reports of conscious awareness; (2) disruption of hippocampal-cortical integration should affect both memory formation and the continuity of conscious experience; (3) computational models implementing surprise-driven event segmentation should exhibit emergent properties analogous to conscious report. This framework subsumes multiple accounts of consciousness and offers a novel perspective on why conscious experience appears continuous despite evidence for discrete processing: every time our brain detects and encodes a new event in memory, it may be painting our fleeting portrait of the present moment.

Theories of consciousness are increasingly incorporating the phenomenology of time, but they do so in different ways. Theories based on predictive processing, global workspace, and integrated information, have each begun to recognise different timescales of experience (fast and slow). By contrast, some higher-order theories propose experience as reflecting lagged averages of unconsciously integrated content over longer timescales. These apparent contrasts might be due to an impoverished view of the nature of conscious contents evolving over distinct timescales. We suggest that phenomenal content can evolve over multiple time scales simultaneously, and that these different timescales correspond to different degrees of perceptual (in)determinacy. We illustrate this view using empirical and real-world examples of sprinters, gist perception, pain reflex withdrawal, and postdiction. We further propose that the perceptual experience evoked by a stimulus becomes increasingly determinate over time. For example, (fast) conscious perception of a change can be distinct from classifying or recognizing the nature of the change. In this view, rapid perceptual experiences are possible but they may be indeterminate. More generally, depending on the target experience and experimental probes used, one could end up with conflicting notions of conscious experience, especially only if a single timescale of content is considered. This could lead to hasty claims about conscious experience being continuous or discrete, or mistakenly assigning functions relevant to an anchored duration. Finer consideration of time can lead to more productive interactions between theory and experiment in pursuing a mathematically-informed neurophenomenology.

Conscious experiences are highly structural, being related to one another in varying degrees of similarities and differences. Recently, interest towards these structural features has grown in all fields of consciousness studies, from philosophy to neurosciences. While the methodological use of structural tools such as mathematical spaces does not necessarily amount to specific metaphysical commitments, on a stronger reading, structuralism can be interpreted as favouring physicalist and reductionist positions or as aligning well with structural realism about science.

It is often argued that all that the natural sciences give access to is structure. Regardless, phenomenal experiences (or qualia) have long been considered to have non-structural, intrinsic properties. Intrinsicality lies at the core of traditional epistemic and modal arguments put forward to challenge or reject physicalist or functionalist positions.

In contrast, structuralism rejects the intrinsicality of qualia, viewing them as exhausted by their relational properties and individuating them by their position in a structure. This in turn could open the possibility of explaining qualia in purely scientific terms and of identifying them with certain neural structures.

I favourably review arguments advanced by proponents of structuralism about consciousness. In particular, I explore some empirical evidence in favour of the strict relationality of qualia as well as promising potential answers to epistemic and modal arguments on offer. I examine the behaviour and consequences of structuralist thinking when handling cases of multiple realizability. Finally, I consider structuralism's limitations when addressing the more general question of determining whether or not a particular system is conscious.

The question of which mental functions require consciousness has come to the forefront because of its relevance for investigating animal consciousness. I argue that most of the current research gets the functions associated with consciousness wrong. For two reasons: first, spontaneous intuitions about the role of consciousness are unreliable; second, the relevant empirical research is distorted by a confounding factor.

I start by flagging two fallacies that bias our spontaneous understanding of the role of consciousness in our mental lives. The ‘consciousness-only’ fallacy is to conclude that a conscious state is relevant for a mental function or behavior just because it correlates with that function or behavior. The ‘consciousness-first’ fallacy is to conclude that consciousness itself is required for a function or behavior just because conscious states are involved in the performance of that function or behavior. I illustrate these two fallacies with studies and claims from recent consciousness research.

I then argue that most empirical research interpreted as showing that some functions are associated with consciousness does not actually show this. Instead, it merely shows that the relevant functions falter when based on degraded sensory signals—which is trivial. In other words, signal strength is a significant confounding factor when investigating which functions require consciousness.

I finish by explaining how we can do better when investigating the functions that require consciousness. Until the relevant research is properly carried out, the presence of functions supposedly associated with consciousness in non-human animals should not convince the skeptics one bit.

Might two individuals, under identical external circumstances, have different experiences without noticing it? Locke’s “inverted spectrum” (IS) thereby asks how we can inter-personally individuate experience: When do you have a red experience like me? Kawakita et al. (KZJTO 2023; 2024) used Gromolov-Wasserstein alignment to approximate empirically when two individuals experience the same color. Here I explore the philosophy behind KZJTO’s approach.

The intuition behind IS motivates individuation by intrinsic qualities (qualia), which are independent of the structures they stand in (Lewis, 1929; Levine, 1995; Goff, 2017) and can switch without affecting cognitive and functional roles. Then, KZJTO fail to prove sameness. But what actually underlies KZJTO’s approach is individuation by structure (Fink et al., 2021; Fink & Kob, 2023; Prentner, 2024): Some isomorphism between the make-up of individuals A and B fixes the conditions under which A and B have the same color experience.

However, while KZJTO found an optimal transport, their data also shows slight divergences, which also need a structuralist interpretation. Some structuralists argue that IS are impossible due to the inherent asymmetries of quality spaces, which hold either necessarily (Hilbert & Kalderon, 2000) or contingently (Lyre, 2022). Then, divergences ought to be attributed to noise or measurement errors.

I explore an alternative option, based on the assumptions that identity does not allow for approximation and that structural individuation is holistic. Then, these divergences rather suggest that your red is never my red. I investigate several responses to and implications of this radical denial of inter-personal qualia individuation.

Integrated information theory (IIT) continues to garner intense interest – and controversy – thanks to its ambition to explain the fundamental physical basis of phenomenal consciousness. Unfortunately, the theory is frequently misunderstood, which holds back progress, and resolution of controversy. This presentation seeks to increase understanding of IIT and its successes, and the challenges it faces. We give a high-level overview of IIT, focusing on how the three key quantities of (i) system integrated information, (ii) cause-effect structure, and (iii) structure integrated information (Phi) purport to describe the quality and quantity of consciousness of any candidate system. We explain why, in current versions of IIT, these quantities are not well-defined for real physical systems, but only on toy model systems that lack physical interpretability. We discuss why high Phi is necessary but not sufficient for a rich inner subjective life (with reference to the so-called ‘expander grid’ thought experiment). Essentially, to have rich conscious contents a system must achieve high Phi repeatedly over time, and with distinct transitions between multiple cause-effect structures. We discuss the difference between proxy and approximation measures of Phi. We argue that proxy Phi measures, as opposed to approximations, have been successfully applied to empirical data and should encourage further development of IIT. Approximations however require the additional criterion of being well-defined. Finally, we discuss recent work explaining how experiences of space and time arise, illustrating how IIT can successfully link neural structures to conscious contents without needing to solve the problem of concocting a well-defined Phi.

Abstract

One of the great frontiers of consciousness science is understanding how early consciousness arises in the development of the human infant. Accounts of the ontogeny of consciousness can be divided into two broad camps: ‘early-onset’ views, which locate the emergence of consciousness at, or shortly after, birth, and ‘late-onset’ views, which locate the emergence of consciousness significantly after birth (at least one year old). The lack of language and the very limited motor function preclude self-report or behavioural responses and, thus, prevent the direct empirical assessment of consciousness in fetuses or neonates. To circumvent this problem, some recent studies have taken another strategy, using neuroimaging measures to investigate whether some neural markers for consciousness found in adults already exist in fetuses and very young infants. For instance, the intrinsic connectivity within and across networks that are correlated with the capacity of consciousness (e.g., the default mode and frontoparietal networks) were found to be present in neonates at full-term birth or term-equivalent age. The P300-like “negative slow wave” responses (to global oddballs) — a putative EEG signature of conscious processing in adults — were observed in newborns and fetuses past 35 weeks of gestational age. We will present these and other recent findings suggesting that the capacity for consciousness is in place at birth. We will also consider key factors in the ontogeny of high-order cognition, such as sleep, social interaction and affectionate touch. Finally, we will consider the ethical implications of the early onset of consciousness in human development.

Rationale on symposium's general scientific interest

From the potential to unlock a wealth of knowledge on optimizing learning and lifelong outcomes to transforming neonatal care, understanding the ontogeny of consciousness holds great interest for scientific advancement and clinical practice.

The general scientific interest in this area is evident in a glut of expert reviews, from nearly none to seven in the last four years (Dehaene-Lambertz 2024 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Passos-Ferreira 2024 Neuron, Frohlich and Bayne 2024 Acta Paediatrica, Birch 2024 The Edge of Sentience, Bayne et al. 2023 Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Ciaunica et al. 2021 Neuroscience of Consciousness, Padilla and Lagercrantz Acta Paediatrica 2020).

Rationale on complementarity of talks

Two neuroscientists, a philosopher and a consultant neonatologist, all actively engaged in infant consciousness research, will present the latest state-of-the-art developments in this field. Various technologies, including MRI, EEG and diffuse optical tomography will be merged to address the question of infant awareness, from diverse perspectives including an ethical and theoretical framework (Passos-Ferreira), data-driven evidence (Frohlich, Naci) and clinical experience on the neonatal intensive care unit (Austin). This work will inform ethical considerations of newborn consciousness for individual infants, their carers and the wider society, as well as new directions in this burgeoning field.

Rationale on timeliness/importance

The recent increased attention in infant consciousness builds on 20 years of methodological and conceptual advances in consciousness science. Historically, newborn infants routinely underwent surgical procedures without anaesthesia or analgesia, a practice that continued into the 1980s. To this day, clinicians face the challenge of balancing the potential for pain in painful medical procedures (e.g., intubations) against the risks associated with medications intended to alleviate that pain. These medical decisions would hugely benefit from empirical evidence on the timing and nature of conscious awareness in infants. We now have the tools to address scientifically these fundamental questions.

Rationale on panel inclusivity

The symposium has a diverse intellectual background with speakers in different career stages: a senior neuroscientist, a senior neonatal clinician, a tenure-track philosopher-psychologist, and a junior postdoc neuroscientist. Demographically, it has national, ethnic, and gender diversity in national origin and ethnicity (an Albanian-Canadian woman, a Brazilian woman, an American man, and an Indian-French-Australian man.) Furthermore, four universities accross mainland Europe (Unviersity of Tübingen, Germany), northern Europe (University of Cambridge, UK; Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) and the United States (New York University, USA) are represented.

Abstract

Human beings are likely not the only organisms that enjoy conscious experiences, yet, the standards traditionally used to assess conscious state in humans (e.g., subjective reports) have limited applicability to non-human animals. The time is now ripe for departing from conventional anthropocentric approaches to examine the foundations and minimal instances of consciousness more broadly within the animal kingdom, across species with diverse neural and bodily architectures. The talks in this symposium explore promising foundations of non-human consciousness, with a special focus on key properties and capacities of non-mammalian organisms. Azenet Lopez discusses the roles of informational integration, a key property of any form of consciousness according to the Integrated Information Theory, for sensory experience in corvids and cephalopods. Nicola (Nicky) Clayton compares mental time travel abilities also in corvids and cephalopods, drawing implications for the evolutionary and biological foundations of consciousness. Nadine Meertens advocates a minimal concept of awareness based on action-perception abilities in a variety of organisms. Finally, Carlos Montemayor contrasts the attentional capacities of mammals with the more minimal attentional capacities of some insects. Altogether, this symposium promotes a gradualistic, evolution-based stance, with emphasis on variability and gradability in conscious experiences and associated abilities across species. It highlights the importance of comparative approaches for understanding how different neural and bodily architectures may give rise to varying degrees of consciousness (or awareness) and ways of being conscious, helping to move beyond anthropocentric models toward a more inclusive framework.

Rationale on symposium's general scientific interest

This symposium moves beyond anthropocentric and mammalian models of consciousness. It engages with the growing body of work that examines consciousness across a diverse range of species, highlighting the gradability and variability that conscious experiences can take in nonhuman animals. Specific capacities widely used to probe consciousness are discussed, namely mental time travel (Clayton) and attention (Montemayor). Novel conceptual work is introduced, based on a minimal notion of awareness (Meertens). Finally, the promising but controversial framework of the Integrated Information Theory is extended to two species often cited as counterexamples, but rarely discussed in depth (Lopez).

Rationale on complementarity of talks

Our four talks show how cognitive diversity and environmental pressures shape consciousness, offering a cohesive cross-species view, informed by philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and comparative cognition. Our focus lies on the foundations of consciousness, accounting for varieties in bodily and neural architectures, environmental niches, and the demands faced by organisms that play a role in the development of consciousness. Azenet Lopez applies Integrated Information Theory, typically used to explain human phenomenology, to non-human animals with importantly dissimilar neural architectures, namely corvids and cephalopods. Nicky Clayton follows by exploring mental time travel in these same animals, examining its role in the evolutionary foundations of consciousness. Where the first talk provides a discussion on the various neural architectures of these animals, the second emphasises the evolutionary and biological role of mental time travel in conscious experience. Nadine Meertens focuses on action-perception abilities across species, proposing a minimal notion of awareness that encourages structured interspecies comparisons, such as those discussed in the previous talks. Finally, Carlos Montemayor compares the attentional capacities of mammals with those of insects, further highlighting variations in conscious abilities across species. Together, these talks offer complementary perspectives on how neural and cognitive diversity, alongside variation in environmental and social pressures, shape the emergence of consciousness, thereby providing a cohesive picture of how consciousness varies and evolves across species.

Rationale on timeliness/importance

The urgency for advancing our understanding of consciousness in nonhuman animals is underscored by both welfare and ethical considerations. As society increasingly recognizes the cognitive and emotional capacities of various species, addressing the quality and distribution of consciousness becomes imperative for developing appropriate welfare standards. By discussing the foundations or minimal instantiations of consciousness across diverse animal species, this symposium provides essential insights that can inform ethical frameworks, ultimately guiding policies that ensure the humane treatment of sentient beings. Moreover, the recent surge in research on artificial intelligence has amplified the call for markers or indicators of consciousness. As AI systems become more sophisticated, debates surrounding their potential conscious experiences challenge our existing paradigms and encourage a reevaluation of what constitutes consciousness. This intersection of animal cognition and AI prompts vital questions about non-anthropocentric approaches to consciousness and awareness, raising the possibility that different forms or gradations of consciousness may exist beyond traditional human and mammalian frameworks. By focusing on the origins and manifestations of consciousness across a wide array of species, this symposium aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of sentience and its ethical implications. It emphasises the need for comparative research to bridge the gaps in our knowledge, facilitating more informed discussions about consciousness.

Rationale on panel inclusivity

Our panel consists of scholars representing various fields, including philosophy of mind, neurophilosophy, cognitive science, psychology and comparative cognition. There is also diversity in the participants’ career stages and socio-cultural backgrounds, including an early career PhD student who is a first-generation academic, a postdoctoral researcher, and two established professors. The panel embodies an international perspective in that participants originate from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Mexico and are employed in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The underrepresentation of women in the field of consciousness studies is addressed in that three of our four participants are women. Moreover, two of our four participants were born and raised in Latin-America, thus representing yet another minority group in consciousness research.

We use our private feelings of confidence to coordinate our public, social lives. For example, when making joint decisions we can share our uncertainty honestly to reach an accurate consensus, or exaggerate our confidence to exaggerate our influence on the group. Some theories in cognitive neuroscience suggest that we can strategically distort the confidence we express to others while leaving our private feelings unchanged. But other theories suppose that our interactions with others may be a key source of beliefs about uncertainty in our own minds. If the latter is true, communicating about confidence with others could alter introspection on ourselves. We tested this idea in a novel decision-making task, where participants made perceptual choices and gave confidence ratings alone, together with a partner and then alone again. Across studies, participants showed ‘confidence matching’, with the confidence they expressed gravitating towards the confidence of their partners. Most importantly, these shifts in reported confidence persisted even after the interaction terminated, and participants made decisions alone again. These effects can be captured by a new predictive learning model, which assumes that agents use the confidence expressed by themselves and others to predict the confidence they ought to feel. These results reveal how the dynamics of social interaction can shape our sense of confidence and point to a mechanism that explains how communication with others can change our private states of mind.

Accurate global confidence -our overall belief in our abilities across tasks- is essential for effective decision-making and goal-setting. While local confidence reflects certainty in individual decisions, the process by which these judgments aggregate into global confidence remains unclear. We investigated how saliency in local confidence influences the formation of global confidence across two experiments, with the hypothesis that salient trials would disrupt the optimal aggregation of local confidences into global confidence. In both experiments, trials were organized into mini-blocks. Participants made decisions about a perceptual stimulus (dot numerosity task), reported their confidence in the correctness of each decision (local confidence), and at the end of each mini-block, reported their global confidence in their overall performance. In Experiment 1, saliency was manipulated by presenting memorable or forgettable images before the perceptual stimulus. Nevertheless, no significant difference was observed in how local confidence contributed to global confidence between memorable and forgettable trials. In Experiment 2, saliency was introduced by tagging certain trials as “special” and assigning them a post-decision bonus. Participants were informed that accurate decisions and local confidence in special trials could yield a monetary reward, but they only learned a trial’s special status after reporting their decision and confidence, ensuring no influence on task performance or local confidence. We found that special trials enhanced local-global metacognitive sensitivity -alignment between local and global confidence- for subsequent trials while disrupting this for earlier ones. Therefore, salient trials acted like spotlights, improving alignment for future trials but casting a shadow on preceding ones.

Psychosis is characterized by erroneous beliefs and delusions, thought to stem from impaired predictive processes. However, how these deficits originate and implicit and explicit processes’ contribution remains unresolved. Given well-documented ocular abnormalities in psychosis, we focus on the interaction between implicit ocular expectations and explicit decisions in forming aberrant predictions.

We examine probabilistic learning in a cross-sectional sample spanning the psychosis continuum (N = 150), including clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHRp), after a first psychotic episode (FEP), and control groups. In a virtual-reality-based paradigm, explicit decisions and post-decision gaze dynamics, that reflect an ocular confidence-like assessment of explicit decisions (Stern et al., 2024), were compared.

Explicit accuracy was impaired across the psychosis continuum (r = -0.19, p = .03), CHRp’s learning curve plateau was reduced (p = .005), and they switched their response rule more often (p = .01). These behaviors presumably reflect an overestimation of the environment’s volatility. Turning to implicit ocular expectations, CHRp’s gaze increasingly diverged from their explicit decisions (p = .01), reflecting reduced ocular confidence and the “hedging” of their responses in a volatile environment. Nonetheless, despite reduced ocular confidence, CHRp’s ocular metacognition was preserved (p = .57). Metacognition was significantly impaired only in FEP (p = .04), possibly serving as a protective factor in CHRp against full-blown psychosis.

These findings point to the overestimation of the environment’s volatility as driving impaired probabilistic learning in psychosis. Perceived volatility affected primarily explicit decisions, yet also reduced ocular confidence and increased the divergence between explicit and implicit expectations across the psychosis continuum.

The cold control theory of response to imaginative suggestions calling for distortions in veridical experience (including hypnotic suggestions) states that behavioural and cognitive responses are generated intentionally, but are perceived as involuntary due to inaccurate higher order thoughts of intending. Previous research has placed imagination as central to this response, yet imagined scenarios alone do not appear to result in feelings of automaticity or involuntariness. Here we explored whether imagined involuntariness, while imagining not being aware of thoughts to the contrary, will result in a greater sensation of involuntariness. We compared training in imagined involuntariness with simple practice in responding to imaginative suggestions, by comparing scores for subjective response and feelings of involuntariness for six suggestions. The pilot results have been confirmed as reproducible by an independent statistician. These were insensitive, but a post hoc analysis indicated that had the test suggestions been limited to motor suggestions (as the training had been), with the hallucination suggestions eliminated, then it would have found evidence to support the training group resulting in greater subjective effects and sensations of involuntariness than the control group. We are currently conducting a registered study to test training on motor suggestions and, if successful, we will repeat with hallucination suggestions. The results bare on the debate as to whether hypnotic response can be trained.

Voluntary decisions are endogenously driven choices guided by subjective goals and preferences. Although fMRI studies have identified brain regions involved in voluntary decision-making, it remains unclear how voluntary decisions unfold over time. Specifically, do evidence accumulation dynamics observed during perceptual and memory-based decisions also occur during voluntary decisions? Additionally, do motor preparatory processes differ between voluntary and forced (i.e., instructed or stimulus-cued) decisions?

Using electroencephalography, we examined two event-related potential (ERP) components that gradually build-up and peak around response onset: the centro-parietal positivity (CPP), indexing evidence accumulation, and the readiness potential (RP), reflecting motor preparation. Forty-nine participants completed a colour decision task with voluntary (two options) and forced (one option) trials. We compared CPP and RP waveforms across decision types and assessed whether their build-up rates scaled with response times (RTs). Stimulus- and response-aligned ERPs were separately examined using a deconvolution algorithm.

We did not find differences in CPP or RP waveforms between voluntary and forced decisions. However, RTs were positively associated with build-up rates for both components, with faster decisions reflecting steeper accumulation rates. This suggests that the CPP and RP reliably track accumulation dynamics during voluntary decisions.

This study extends key findings from other decision-making domains to voluntary decision-making, revealing similar evidence accumulation and motor preparatory dynamics between voluntary and other forms of decision-making. Notably, this is the first study to show that the CPP tracks evidence accumulation in voluntary decision-making. Furthermore, our results support the notion that motor preparatory processes are similar between voluntary and forced decisions.

A fundamental question in memory research is why some past events are vividly recalled while others are forgotten. The sense of agency (SoA), the feeling of controlling one’s own actions and their effects in the environment (Haggard, 2017), may play a critical role in shaping memory, as both involve self-referential processes (Tulving, 2002; Wen & Haggard, 2018). Here, we investigated whether SoA over the displacement of objects via motor actions modulates long-term memory for these objects in healthy human adults (N =30). Participants pressed a button to move a picture of an object displayed on the screen, where the picture’s movement was either spatially congruent or incongruent with their action. One hour later, memory for the objects (what) and their locations (where) was assessed in a recognition task. Results showed higher agency ratings following congruent versus incongruent trials (difference: 81.45±3.84; p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 3.87). Crucially, higher SoA during encoding was associated with faster reaction times in the old-new recognition task (difference: -0.14±0.06; p = 0.034, Cohen’s d = -0.41; trial-by-trial analysis: p = 0.067) and improved location memory accuracy (difference: 0.19±0.05; p = 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.66; trial-by-trial analysis: p < 0.001). These findings highlight a link between SoA and memory, implying that the brain may prioritize the encoding of events with clear cause-and-effect relationships.

Humans have the capacity to feel a subjective sense of regret – a rather sophisticated emotion that involves counterfactual simulation of paths-not-taken (Frith and Metzinger, 2016). Pathological levels of regret, as in states like rumination, are a hallmark of multiple psychiatric conditions (Menzies, 2022; Sijtsema et al. 2022). However, little is understood about how subjective feelings of regret connect to the learning and inference processes we use to make decisions – and how alterations in these processes may explain atypical experiences of regret.

We developed a reward learning task with sporadic probes for post-choice regret. Reinforcement learning modelling revealed that subjective feelings of regret were closely and independently tied to evolving beliefs about action values and trial outcomes. Crucially, by retesting the sample at separate timepoints, we found that the ‘regret weights’ afforded to predictions and outcomes were stable within individuals over time – with some participants consistently relying less on their predictive models of the environment and more on (potentially spurious) outcomes when forming feelings of regret.

In a large follow-up sample, we connected these insights about prediction, learning and regret to transdiagnostic psychiatric symptoms. This revealed how the tendency to downweight internal models and upweight trial-by-trial outcomes related to mental health dimensions through trait rumination.

Our findings provide a mechanistic perspective on how the subjective experience of regret arises through internal monitoring of basic learning and inference processes, and offer insights into how disruptions of this monitoring process become a core feature of pathological experiences.

Moral dilemmas involve choosing between two mutually exclusive options with opposing moral values. In the trolley dilemma, for example, a participant has to choose between saving as many people as possible, or not being involved in the death of a single individual. Multiple studies showed that individual participants experience a sense of agency and responsibility for the outcomes of moral decisions when they are the actor of that decision. In real life, however, moral decisions are rarely made in isolation. When making decisions together with others, people typically do not experience the same level of agency or responsibility for the outcome. The current research aims to investigate how participants’ reactions to the outcomes of moral dilemmas are different for collective vs individual decisions. To investigate this, we designed an experiment in which participants are paired into face-to-face dyads and are presented with a series of trolley-like moral dilemmas. They first report their response privately on an external device (alone trials), then make a collective decision by reaching a consensus (social trials). Simultaneous EEG recordings of the two participants are made during the whole task. Feedback-related negativity (FRN) and the P3 component will be used to quantify to which degree participants process outcomes of individual decisions differently from collective decisions. Preliminary results will be presented at the conference. These results will contribute to explaining how the sense of agency can be modulated by social contexts.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology promises to enhance our agency by decoding user intentions, even if the user lacks the capacity for intentional bodily movement. Users have been documented as experiencing a sense of agency, both explicit and implicit, over their BCI actions and outcomes, akin to the sense of agency experienced in the embodied case (Caspar et al.). In contrast, experimental decoding of intentions — such as the much-discussed broad Libet-inspired paradigm — has been taken to threaten agency, exposing the illusion of conscious control, even if the agent has a full range of intentional bodily movement. Intriguingly, both projects rely on the same neurotechnology and brain activity.

In this work, I review the case for BCI actions and outcomes as intentional action and as attributable to the conscious agent. I re-visit classic armchair thought experiments in action theory as well as neuroscience of agency. I outline four candidate characterizations of (active) BCI use, as non-action events, as basic mental action, as non-basic action, and as basic extended action.The standard causalist story of action should cohere well with BCI action under the umbrella of basis mental action and nonbasic intentional action given its compatibility with physical realizers and causal mechanisms. However, I argue that on the standard causalist view, BCI users are only agents in the sense of consciously (or not) intending outcomes; their agency stops there, “in the head”. In response, I argue that the best case for BCI use as agency involves adopting an extended casual mind framework.

In psychology, shared representations are thought to exist beyond individual minds, as theorized by Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious—a shared repository of universal experiences, memories, and symbols. Our focus is on how artificial architectures underlying artificial agents can share their representations to build a common sense and collective construct. We will propose a model of agentivity for the assembly of agents that accounts for the agentivity of the parts but cannot be restricted to them. In this model, each agent is an active inferer; it performs a cycle of actions based on preferences and inferences based on observations, with an additional message-passing step where all agents exchange their beliefs to ensure compatibility of their beliefs while keeping their own singular point of view on their environment. Compatibility of beliefs ensures a collective representation that serves as the basis for shared agentivity. Such a model relies on a novel methodological tool for variational inference in the multi-agent setting for active inference, where each agent has its own partial and subjective experience of the environment and must reconcile with others' points of view in order for the whole collection of agents to work in synchrony. In our model, the compatibility of beliefs does not imply consensus but is simply a way to ensure that each agent is referring to the same environment. The beliefs reached by such agents in an exploration task are informative on what particular beliefs arise from shared agentivity.

Agency, the feeling of controlling one's actions and their outcomes, is distorted in several neurodegenerative disorders, disrupting normal consciousness (Haggard, 2017). Here, we study the effects of agency on apathy, a transdiagnostic syndrome of amotivation (Marin, 1991) linked to decreased reward sensitivity and resulting in a reduced acceptance rate during effort-based decision-making (EBDM) tasks (Le Heron et al., 2019). We hypothesize that loss of agency decreases willingness to act, reflecting a state of increased apathy. To test this hypothesis, we ran a study (n=22) in a healthy young sample using a validated EBDM task, where participants receive offers to perform physical effort (i.e., keyboard tapping) for a reward, which they can accept or reject. We modified this task to manipulate agency by adding a visuomotor conflict to the visual tapping feedback. Our study found a marginally significant reduction in trial acceptance for the high visuomotor conflict condition. Moreover, group modeling of the data suggests that low agency specifically affects participants’ reward evaluation of the effort-reward decision, akin to the decreased reward sensitivity found in apathetic patients. These findings suggest agency plays a role in modulating motivation in a way that reduces willingness to exert effort for reward when agency is diminished. Broadly, our results highlight the role of agency in conscious experience, as agency disruptions alter decision-making and motivation. This offers a new path for studying apathy in diseases like Parkinson’s that have been linked to a reduced sense of agency.

Introduction. Higher brain functions, such as perceptual decision-making, are thought to depend on maintaining an optimum balance between excitatory and inhibitory interactions in cortical circuits(1-3). The neurotransmitters setting cortical excitation-inhibition ratio (“E/I-ratio”), GABA and glutamate (via NMDA receptors), are altered in schizophrenia/SCZ(4). We compared behavioural markers of GABAergic and NMDA-mediated interactions between SCZ patients and healthy controls (HCs).

Methods. 41 SCZ patients and 41 matched HCs compared two simultaneous visual circular grating sequences, which fluctuated in contrast over 1 second, reporting which within-trial sequence (left/right) displayed higher average contrast. This task quantified two candidate markers of cortical E/I-interactions: “psychophysical kernels”, the temporal weighting of contrast fluctuations on choice; and “choice history bias” (CHB), the impact of previous choices on current ones.

Results. SCZ placed less emphasis on contrast information occurring early in trials than HCs. There was no overall group difference in CHB, but SCZ showed a reduced tendency to repeat previous correct choices during repetitive, predictable stimulus sequences.

Conclusion. Results identify SCZ-related alterations in GABAergic, NMDA-mediated cortical interactions shaping decision-making at both within-/across-trial timescales. Although somewhat contentious, reduced within-trial weighting of early perceptual information does occur in some circuit models of SCZ under decreased E/I-ratio(5). Additionally, reduced CHB in predictable environments in SCZ is consistent with NMDA hypofunction effects found previously in related task contexts(6). Together, these findings provide multi-scalar mechanistic markers elucidating the neurocomputational underpinnings of aberrantly altered perception.

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2.Shadlen, J Neurosci(1998);18(10):3870-96

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4.Uhlhaas, Nat Rev Neurosci(2010);11(2):100-13

5.Lam, J Neurosci(2022);42(6):1035-53

6.Stein, Nat Commun(2020);11:4250

To what extent does subjective appraisal shape cognition and behavior? While this question may appear trivial, it becomes essential when subjective experience misrepresents reality. We know that placebos, as well as suggestion in general, can produce genuine physiological effects. However, their underlying mechanisms remain unclear.

Here, we focused on the role of subjective experience in conflict tasks, which involve congruency relationships between prime target and stimuli. In this context, Desender et al. (2014) showed that the sequential congruency effect (SCE; Gratton, 1992) only occurs when people actually experience the conflict. In contrast, van Gaal et al. (2010) argued that adaptation effects can result from unconsciously triggered conflicts.

Here, taking inspiration from Palmeri et al. (1999) and the phenomenal suggestions literature, we aimed to go one step further and explore what happens when there is no conflict whatsoever, but people believe there is. To do so, we asked participants to respond to the orientation of a target arrow also acting as a metacontrast mask for a congruent or incongruent prime. Unknown to participants, the prime was neutral on half the trials, but an auditory cue suggested the presence of a conflict, just as a nocebo pill.

Our behavioral results show that the SCE is triggered after a sham-induced experience of conflict and that this effect is influenced by participants' capacity to modulate their subjective experience (i.e., phenomenological control, see Dienes & Lush, 2023). We conclude that this spontaneous adaptive behavior (SCE) can be shaped solely by people’s subjective experience.

Serial dependencies in perceptual tasks have been suggested to reflect implicit perceptual priors derived from short-term perceptual history. Generally, a reduced weighting of perceptual priors has been proposed as a mechanism underlying psychotic experiences such as delusions and hallucinations. In this study, we examined how implicit and explicit perceptual priors influence auditory decision-making and their modulation by psychosis proneness. Across two online experiments, 197 healthy participants in whom psychosis proneness was measured using standard questionnaires completed an auditory two-alternative forced-choice task. In experiment 1, implicit perceptual priors were assessed by quantifying the influence of preceding on current perceptual choices. We found a significant positive effect of choice history and a negative modulation of this choice history bias by psychosis proneness. In experiment 2, we manipulated explicit perceptual priors by providing probabilistic cues before each trial. We found significant effects of choice history and probabilistic cues, but only the latter was negatively influenced by psychosis proneness. Interestingly, both experiments showed an increased reliance on the available stimulus information with higher psychosis proneness suggesting alternated perceptual awareness. Using Hidden Markov Models, we found no conclusive evidence for a modulation of the temporal dynamics of perceptual decision-making by psychosis proneness. Our findings support the notion of a shift in perceptual inference away from perceptual priors and towards sensory information as a mechanism facilitating psychosis. The degree to which psychosis proneness modulates the effects of different types of perceptual priors seems to depend on the sources of priors available in a given experimental context.

The influence of action-based predictions on perception is fundamental, particularly for understanding the sense of agency, i.e., the subjective experience of control over one’s actions and their outcomes. While the literature reports mixed results, such as sensory attenuation or enhancement, the current research aims to contribute to our understanding of how actions and predictions influence visual perception through two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a grating and were asked to reproduce its orientation. Before the grating onset, different cues allowed them to predict its global orientation based on their own action (free-choice or forced-choice conditions) or an external cue (passive predicted condition), while in a control condition (passive neutral), no prediction was possible. Results revealed that perceptual precision in the reproduction task improved in both the free-choice and externally cued predictions compared to the passive neutral condition, whereas forced-choice predictions provided no such benefit. Experiment 2 investigated whether participants relied more on their predictions when the stimulus was harder to perceive. This was tested by examining the impact of free-choice action-based predictions under two levels of stimulus ambiguity within the same reproduction task. Results showed enhanced perceptual precision in the predicted condition compared to the unpredicted condition, regardless of task difficulty. Findings suggest that both cue-based and action-based predictions can improve perceptual precision, but crucially, only when action are freely chosen. A lack of intentionality on action-based predictions may reduce attentional allocation to sensory action-effects, potentially limiting the benefits of sensory predictions for perception.

The sense of agency (SoA), the feeling of being the author of one’s actions and outcomes, is critical for decision-making. While prior research has explored its neural correlates, most studies have focused on neutral tasks, overlooking moral decision-making. In addition, previous studies mainly used convenience samples, ignoring that some social environments may influence how authorship in moral decision-making is processed. This study investigated the neural correlates of SoA in civilians and military officer cadets, examining free and coerced choices in both agent and commander roles. Using an fMRI paradigm where participants could either freely choose or follow orders to inflict a mild shock on a victim, we assessed SoA through temporal binding (TB)—a temporal distortion between voluntary and less voluntary decisions. Our findings suggested that SoA is reduced when following orders compared to acting freely in both roles. Several brain regions correlated with TB, notably the occipital lobe, superior/middle/inferior frontal gyrus, precuneus, and lateral occipital cortex. Importantly, no differences emerged between military and civilians at corrected thresholds, suggesting that daily environments have minimal influence on the neural basis of moral decision-making, enhancing the generalizability of the findings.

When we make decisions, we often have a subjective experience of "knowing that we know" - a feeling of confidence in our choice. Researchers have studied this feeling by asking people to rate how confident they feel after making a decision. Traditionally, researchers assumed that asking participants to self-report their subjective confidence wouldn't change the decision-making process. However, recent studies have begun to question this assumption, showing that the very act of thinking about our subjective confidence can either help or hurt our ability to make accurate decisions, a so-called reactivity effect1. In three experiments, we had participants perform blocks of a perceptual discrimination task with or without confidence ratings. We found that confidence ratings elicited contemporaneously with perceptual decisions impaired decision accuracy, while retrospective confidence ratings did not. Furthermore, we found that when we delayed responding to allow for sufficient post-stimulus processing, then eliciting contemporaneous confidence ratings was no longer reactive. These findings suggest that there is a disassociation between the perceptual experience and the metacognitive experience, such that when they occur simultaneously, interference arises that impairs decision accuracy. This implies that subjective feelings of confidence arise from a distinct set of evidence to the primary perceptual decision. In practice, these findings also raise important questions about whether asking people to rate their confidence is an appropriate way to study consciousness, as scientists have long assumed.

References

1. Lei, Wei, et al. "Metacognition-related regions modulate the reactivity effect of confidence ratings on perceptual decision-making." Neuropsychologia 144 (2020): 107502.

In the philosophy of mind, there is a view that we experience our own actions in a distinct way, contrasting with the passive experience of other events. This “agentive awareness” is difficult to pinpoint in mental vocabulary without reducing it to mere sensory effects. The representational theory of mind may help clarify this awareness through the concept of directive representations that function in an “output-oriented” manner – such as motor representations (MR). I highlight the challenges of using directive representations as vehicles of conscious content by drawing on examples from cognitive science. First, the motor simulation theory posits that MR become conscious during motor imagery, but there their role is reduced to reproducing the sensory effects of movement. Second, according to the comparator model of the sense of agency (SoA) a copy of the MR is processed and compared with movement effects, leading to SoA, yet the format of SoA is independent of the MR format and thus open to multiple interpretations. Third, motor intentions, the immediate causal antecedents of movement, remain unconscious and do not directly support the experience of initiating movement despite depending on higher-level intentions. In all these cases, the functional role of MR as output does not yield a specific format of mental content. To address this, I propose a process-based account of directive representations, linking agentive awareness to changes in sensory and cognitive content, and offering a novel framework for understanding how actions are experienced. This framework encompasses both metacognitive and motor control.

Metacognition comprises the ability to estimate the accuracy of predictions about the world. A variety of measures for this ability exist. The most established measures (meta-d’, M-ratio) are based on signal detection theory and require assumptions on underlying normal noise. Recently, measures based on Classical Information Theory have been proposed which have the advantage of requiring fewer assumptions. We further develop this approach based on the key quantity: the information transmitted via confidence reports. We show that predictions with a fixed overall accuracy are consistent with a range of possible transmitted information values and we present tight upper and lower bounds for this range. Based on these bounds, we propose a new, normalized measure of metacognition: For a fixed accuracy, this measure assigns a value of 1 when information is transmitted at the most possible rate (corresponding to underlying uniform noise) and 0 when information is transmitted at the least possible rate (corresponding to underlying binary noise). This normalization decouples our measure from the overall accuracy improving upon existing measures, whose ranges depend on the accuracy of the responses — an undesirable confound. We further relate metacognitive ability to the performance in groups: For the case of multiple independent group members combining their predictions about states of the world, we provide upper and lower bounds on the group accuracy and show a strong relation to the individual metacognitive ability. Overall, we present an advanced information-theoretic perspective on measures of metacognition and their connection to group research.

In human evolution, tool use has been one of the most important milestones. Metacognition has been suggested as a critical mental ability for this capability. To investigate its role in tool use under uncertainty, we developed a novel paradigm that involves action selection during tool use scenarios and subjective metacognitive reports.

We adapted a claw machine arcade game into a 2D video game where participants pick and drop balls. To manipulate outcome uncertainty, we varied the balls' weights in terms of their mean and spread, resulting in a 2×2 design with four conditions: lighter or heavier (generally easier or harder to pick up), and certain or uncertain (narrow and wide weight distributions around given mean weights).

After training, participants made trial-wise choices between two balls from different conditions, each associated with a reward. Then, before executing the action, participants reported their metacognitive judgements via prospective confidence ratings: one about the optimality of their choice for their overall reward count, and another about their ability to successfully pick and drop the ball.

Preliminary results from our pilot study indicate that participants have metacognitive insight into both the potential success of their tool use and outcome uncertainty, with a tendency for higher confidence in the former.

We discuss these findings in the context of existing confidence models and suggest potential applications for artificial agents.

Self-evaluations of perceptual decision accuracy are thought to rely on a general metacognitive mechanism that computes confidence as a common currency across tasks. As a subjective variable, it is a challenge to directly manipulate confidence. Rather, the study of confidence has relied on correlational approaches, indirectly manipulating confidence by varying the available decision evidence. Here, we tested whether we can directly manipulate confidence by appropriating the classical psychophysical method of sensory adaptation to confidence adaptation.

We tested 100 observers’ metacognitive sensitivity in a forced-choice confidence paradigm: Participants were asked to choose which of two orientation discrimination decisions was more likely to be correct. This followed a long sequence of numerosity and colour discrimination decisions, in which task difficulty was manipulated to either be varied (baseline), relatively difficult (low-confidence adaptation), or relatively easy (high-confidence adaptation).

The presented stimuli, orientation discrimination sensitivity, and thus the underlying decision evidence relevant for evaluating confidence, was unchanged following each of these prolonged exposure sequences of numerosity/colour discrimination decisions. Yet, we found a systematic change in metacognitive sensitivity following prolonged exposure to high/low confidence decisions compared to baseline, consistent with cross-task confidence adaptation.

The pattern of this change in metacognitive sensitivity disambiguates models of the neural coding scheme of confidence, suggesting a dual-channel coding scheme involving tuning to both increasing confidence and increasing uncertainty. Greater channel responsiveness and more channel overlap predicted better metacognitive sensitivity. This cross-task adaptation provides direct evidence for general metacognitive computations in human observers, and demonstrates adaptive resource allocation for metacognitive processes.

When performing a piece, musicians combine automatic motor control with conscious monitoring. For example, a guitarist may monitor their finger placement, or rely on automatic movements to monitor the sound produced. The Focus of Attention (FOA) effect describes the tradeoff between focusing internally (on finger positioning), or externally (on the resulting sound): focusing externally enhances motor performance compared to focusing internally. While described in movement sciences, the underlying mechanisms of this effect remain poorly understood.

This study examined whether individual differences in metacognitive ability—the capacity to recognize successful cognitive performance— explain FOA effects in music performance. We hypothesized that young adults would perform better under an external focus of attention, and explored whether differences in metacognitive ability to monitor internal (movement-related) versus external (outcome-related) parameters explain this effect. Amateur guitarists played a melody under three FOA conditions (no instruction, internal focus, external focus). Performance was assessed using semi-automated Music Information Retrieval techniques for pitch and rhythm accuracy. Metacognitive ability was measured using m-ratio in a novel paradigm requiring participants to monitor their movements on a guitar neck under visual (internal) and tonal (external) tasks.

Contrary to predictions, FOA conditions did not significantly affect performance, nor did metacognitive ability interact with FOA. However, participants showed higher metacognitive accuracy when monitoring visual (internal) compared to tonal (external) aspects. Psychometric modeling assessed the sources of these differences. These findings challenge external FOA benefits in motor performance, highlight metacognitive accuracy's variability across perceptual domains, and demonstrate novel measurement paradigms for motor skill acquisition insights.

Metacognition can be used to study various non-ordinary states of consciousness like meditation, lucid dreaming and ecstatic epilepsy. Metacognition presents a declarative facet, defined as the declarative knowledge on how cognition works (e.g. epistemic beliefs), and a procedural facet, defined as monitoring and control functions for cognition to modulate itself. Within the procedural facet, the concept of metacognitive feelings (e.g. tip of the tongue feeling) related to cognitive actions (Proust, 2013) is described, giving special attention to “insights”, also defined as metacognitive outcome-oriented feelings, such as the "eureka" or "A-ha Erlebnis” experience. In the context of the modern resurging interest in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (PAT), metacognitive feelings are linked to psychedelic induced non-ordinary states of consciousness by proposing a neuro-cognitive framework to study their interaction. In particular, a parallel between the “metacognitive feeling of epistemic gain” and the noetic quality of the mystical-type experience potentially occurring in PAT is described. By discussing the interplay between metacognition processes and psychedelic-induced non-ordinary states of consciousness, we can gain understanding into fundamental mechanisms of the nature of consciousness and of self-awareness.

Metacognitive self-monitoring is thought to be largely domain-general, with numerous prior studies providing evidence of a metacognitive g-factor. The observation of shared inter-individual variance across different measures of metacognition does not however preclude the possibility that some aspects may nevertheless be domain-specific. In particular, it is unknown the degree to which explicit metacognitive beliefs regarding one's own abilities may exhibit domain generality. Similarly, little is known about how such prior self-beliefs are maintained and updated in the face of new metacognitive experiences. In this study of 330 healthy individuals, we explored metacognitive belief updating across memory, visual, and general knowledge domains spanning nutritional and socioeconomic facts. We find that across all domains, participants strongly reduced their self-belief (i.e., expressed less confidence in their abilities) after completing a multi-domain metacognition test battery. Using psychological network and cross-correlation analyses, we further found that while metacognitive confidence exhibited strong domain generality, metacognitive belief updating was highly domain-specific, such that participants shifted their confidence specifically according to their performance on each domain. Overall, our findings suggest that metacognitive experiences prompt a shift in self-priors from a more general to a more specific focus.

Recent years have seen a substantial proliferation of computational models of confidence and metacognition. The most widely used model, although mostly implicitly assumed by metacognition researchers without empirical testing, is the Independent Truncated Gaussian model (ITG). ITG is the basis of the popular meta-d′/d′ method used to quantify metacognitive ability. However, previous modelling studies of perceptual confidence have not included ITG in formal model comparisons. The present study compares model fit of ITG to seven different alternative models of confidence and metacognition all derived from signal detection theory in a reanalysis of four previously published experiments and one new experiment, (i) a masked orientation discrimination task, (ii) a random-dot motion discrimination task, (iii) a low contrast orientation discrimination task, (iv) a dot numerosity discrimination task, and (v) a low contrast number discrimination task. I show that in all five experiments, alternative models provide a better fit than ITG: In the dot numerosity discrimination task, the best fit is achieved by the signal detection rating model. In the low contrast orientation discrimination task, the logistic noise model performs best. In the other three experiments, the best fit is achieved by either the weighted evidence and visibility model or the logistic weighted evidence and visibility model, implying that at least two sources of evidence are required to account for perceptual confidence, one related to the discrimination judgment, and one related to the reliability of the perceptual evidence. I discuss implications for the measurement of metacognition.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a psychiatric condition characterized by recurrent intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive, impairing behaviors (compulsions). Another key feature of OCD is pathological doubt. A common hypothesis suggests that patients distrust their own memory and perception, leading them to engage in compulsive checking rituals to make a decision. To investigate these (meta)cognitive processes, we asked participants with OCD (N = 10) and healthy controls (N = 11) to perform a numerosity discrimination task where they indicated which of two boxes contained more dots. Participants reported both their decision and confidence (1 to 4) on a combined scale. Importantly, participants could request to replay the stimulus up to five times before deciding, allowing us to investigate information-seeking behavior similar to checkings in OCD. To assess what performance and confidence would have been when a replay was requested, 25% of these replay requests were randomly rejected, forcing participants to respond without additional information. We found that OCD patients used the replay option less appropriately than healthy participants. Indeed, contrarily to healthy participants, patients with OCD performed similarly regardless of whether they answered or asked to replay the stimulus. Furthermore, during refused replay requests, confidence ratings scaled better with accuracy for participants with OCD than for healthy controls. Our results suggest that checking behaviors may not be truly beneficial to decision-making and confidence in OCD. These results might enhance our understanding of what drives compulsive behaviors.

In standard perceptual metacognition paradigms, participants perform a simple perceptual task and report their subjective confidence in the perceptual decision. Typically, it is assumed that confidence ratings collected under these paradigms reflect the subjective probability of making the correct decision, and many models propose some form of probabilistic inference to underpin the calculation of these probabilities. Here we tested this assumption by asking whether confidence reports are distinguishable from reports of task difficulty, since the latter can be estimated heuristically using cues such as fluency, stimulus visibility (or uncertainty) and response speed.

This study drew on data from the Perception Census, a large-scale citizen science project in which participants (>30K) completed numerous perception tasks and questionnaires online. We concentrated analyses on low-, mid- and high-level perceptual tasks in which confidence or subjective difficulty ratings were reported alongside objective decisions. Using a pre-registered machine learning approach, we tested whether reports of confidence and of subjective difficulty reflect the same underlying information. To the extent that they do, we should be able to “cross-predict” between them: algorithms trained to predict confidence from objective choice and stimulus information should generalise to predict (untrained) subjective difficulty, and vice versa.

Results showed that reports of confidence and subjective difficulty indeed reflected the same information, but only for mid- and high-level tasks. This highlights a potential limit to applying normative models of perceptual metacognition to complex tasks, and underscores the importance of considering heuristic strategies in understanding the formation of confidence across different perceptual domains.

Humans and other creatures seek information to improve their cognition and behaviour. Theories in cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology and animal cognition tend to assume a strong connection between information seeking behaviour and explicit metacognition – conscious introspection about our mental states and subjective metacognitive feelings like confidence or uncertainty. However, recent developments in computational neuroscience have stressed that metacognition and uncertainty are not equivalent, and many forms of uncertainty may be monitored in the brain without generating subjective metacognitive feelings. Here, across a series of experiments in adult humans, we show that information seeking and subjective confidence are controlled by distinct forms of uncertainty. In particular, information seeking (but not confidence) is controlled by uncertainty in sampled sensory evidence while confidence (but not information seeking) is controlled by uncertainty caused by decision boundaries. This dissociation suggests that separate computations in the mind and brain shape confidence and information seeking: undermining the idea that information seeking behaviour always depends on conscious introspection into our own states of mind.

Blindsight refers to above-chance residual visual discrimination in the blind field of patients with primary visual cortex lesions. While traditionally considered a form of unconscious vision, some patients report subjective visual experiences distinct from normal sight, and others exhibit residual awareness without measurable discrimination abilities. These dissociations challenge existing models of visual consciousness and highlight the need for a taxonomy that integrates subjective experience.

Here, we present an EEG study with multivariate pattern analysis to investigate the neural correlates of residual vision and metacognition in a cohort of cortically blind patients and matched controls. Participants performed motion detection and motion direction discrimination tasks in their blind and intact hemifields while providing both objective (d') and subjective (meta-d') responses. By prompting for confidence rather than visual awareness, our protocol accounts for the often amodal nature of residual sensations and tests whether blindsight reflects disrupted perceptual metacognition rather than strictly unconscious processing. Preliminary results suggest that correctly detected stimuli in the blind field are associated with widespread frontal activation, aligning with predictions from the Global Neuronal Workspace theory.

Our findings aim to refine the characterization of residual perceptual capacities in blindsight and provide insights into the interplay between metacognitive awareness and non-conscious vision. We discuss implications for theories of consciousness, particularly regarding the role of global neural dynamics in shaping subjective experience.

Metacognition plays a crucial role in learning and decision-making across the life span. However, the neurophysiological substrates of metacognitive processes remain poorly understood. Recent but limited evidence suggests that higher activity in the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NA) system may subserve post-response monitoring processes such as error awareness. In the present study we aim at investigating whether pupil dilation, as an indirect and non-exclusive measure of LC activation, is a robust biomarker of metacognitive monitoring across tasks and cognitive domains. Thirty-nine young adults performed multiple experimental tasks during eye-tracking recordings. An adapted version of the error awareness task was used to replicate the findings on the link between pupil size and error awareness. Moreover, a novel battery of tasks testing mental rotation, visual perception and working memory was employed to test the association between pupil dilation and confidence judgements across cognitive domains. In line with previous evidence, it was found that pupil size was larger after aware errors as compared to unaware errors. Furthermore, pupil dilation during confidence ratings was found to be greater for high confidence judgements in mental rotation, visual perception and working memory tasks. The study findings suggest that pupil dilation can be used as robust marker of metacognitive processes and that noradrenergic function may support metacognition in a domain-general fashion.

Some of the most profound human experiences involve encounters with invisible others—feeling the presence of the dead, being possessed by a spirit, hearing the voice of God. Our study investigated how the brain enables such experiences and how cultural practices shape this capacity.

Using fMRI, we examined two distinct groups: 22 secular tulpamancers, who cultivate relationships with imaginal companions called tulpas, and 25 charismatic Christians who practice speaking in tongues, a form of prayer in which they release control of their tongue to allow God to speak through them. As predicted by our pre-registered hypothesis, both groups showed deactivation of the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) when surrendering agency to these invisible others. This region is centrally implicated in voluntary action and the sense of agency.

We then trained a machine-learning classifier on SMA patterns during the tulpa possession condition, in which the tulpa took control of the practitioner’s hand. Remarkably, this tulpa classifier generalized to our prayer group, predicting above chance when charismatic Christians were speaking in tongues compared to engaging in regular prayer. Furthermore, the SMA showed the highest cross-decoding accuracy of any region in the brain. This cross-context decoding, spanning from secular to religious belief systems and from writing to speech output, reveals a consistent neural signature of surrendering agency to an invisible other.

Our findings demonstrate that humans can deliberately modulate core neural mechanisms of agency and suggest that shared brain processes may underlie experiences of invisible presence across religious and secular contexts.

Introduction: The study of altered states of consciousness, particularly minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) – a content-reduced, non-dual state – is essential for advancing our understanding of consciousness. However, MPE research has mainly relied on skilled meditators who are able to reliably access the target state, thereby limiting the pool of participants for empirical investigation. To address this limitation, this pilot study explores Floatation-Restricted Environmental Stimulation Technique (Floatation-REST) as an experimental paradigm to induce MPE under controlled conditions.

Methods: Participants with meditation experience underwent two conditions: (1) Floatation-REST alone and (2) Floatation-REST combined with nondual meditation. Post-intervention assessments involved semi-structured interviews guided by micro-phenomenological methods, while thematic analysis based on the MPE-M92 questionnaire identified key themes related to MPE phenomenology.

Results: In condition 1, participants reported key MPE indicators, such as the dissolution of body boundaries, loss of the sense of time and space, and absence of self-consciousness. In condition 2, despite the unfamiliarity of meditating supine on water, the sensory-reduced environment markedly enhanced MPE induction, deepening and stabilizing the experience.

Conclusion: These findings demonstrate that Floatation-REST effectively induces MPE phenomenology, with nondual meditation significantly amplifying its depth and consistency when combined. This approach offers a practical alternative to traditional methods, potentially broadening the participant pool to include less experienced meditators or non-meditators, while providing a systematic framework for empirical MPE research.

Background: Challenging psychedelic experiences, particularly those characterised by intense anxiety about the loss of self-awareness (known as Dread of Ego Dissolution, or DED), may compromise therapeutic outcomes. These states share similarities with the 'felt sense of anomaly' reported in dissociative experiences. This study examines whether the Anomalous Experience of Self (CEFSA-S) from the Černis Felt Sense of Anomaly scale predisposes individuals to DED, and explores voice analysis as a screening tool.

Methods: Participants (N=26) completed CEFSA-S at baseline, followed by voice journal recordings over two weeks prior to 5-MeO-DMT administration (12mg). DED was assessed within 3 hours after the experience. Voice recordings were analysed using OpenSMILE (eGeMAPSv02), extracting acoustic features. Relationships between CEFSA-S, voice characteristics, and DED were examined using correlations, hierarchical regression modelling and commonality analysis.

Results: CEFSA-S correlated negatively with jitter variability (r = -0.60), F2 bandwidth variability (r = -0.59), and voice intensity (r = -0.65). In hierarchical regression modelling, CEFSA-S alone explained 27.6% of DED adjusted variance, increasing to 52.5% when combined with voice features. Commonality analysis showed CEFSA-S uniquely explained 26.9% of variance, while voice features 35.3%. F2 bandwidth showed positive shared effects (3.61%, 9.52%), while voice intensity showed negative shared effects (-23.1%).

Conclusions: Anomalous self-experience leaves a measurable "acoustic fingerprint" in speech, with voice features capturing immediate emotional states through prosodic variations, while CEFSA-S reflects cognitive evaluation of self-experience. This complementarity between implicit and reflective measures provides a behavioural marker of anomalous self-experience and offers an approach to risk assessment in psychedelic medicine.

The phenomenon of "pure awareness", central to many contemplative traditions, has recently attracted scientific interest for its relevance to the study of consciousness. In this work, we investigate pure awareness through the algorithmic agent model, a computational framework with roots in algorithmic information theory. This framework proposes that agents build compressive models of the world for evolutionary success. Structured experience arises from running such models, thus linking phenomenology with computation and offering insights into the emergence of pure awareness in both natural and artificial systems. We propose that pure awareness, as a stand-alone phenomenon, may correspond to minimally structured experiences achieved through meditation, psychedelics, or other deconstructive practices. A key hypothesis is that the phenomenology of pure awareness arises from a specific model: the agent's model of its own modeling process. Importantly, the agent's recognition of the modeling process can occur alongside other phenomenal content (as in non-dual awareness) and is associated with stable changes in valence computation, potentially reducing suffering. We will explore some empirical hypotheses in terms of neurobiology and neurophenomenology based on whole-brain computational models. Our exploration offers new insights into consciousness science by examining the minimal possible experiences for an agent and helps us better understand the mechanisms and constraints involved in facilitating such transformative experiences.

This study used a mirror-gazing paradigm to systematically investigate anomalous self-experiences akin to those seen in dissociative disorders, their relations to psychological traits and physiological underpinnings. Thirty-five participants, aged 20 to 46 , completed two 10-minute mirror gazing tasks (MGT) in dimly lit and well-lit conditions, randomly. During the MGT we measured participants' ECG and EEG. We also measured dissociative states, perceptual anomalies experienced during MGT, and psychological traits.

Results showed that mirror-gazing in dim-lighting significantly increased dissociative symptoms and experiences of perceptual anomalies, with more pronounced effects linked to higher baseline depression and anxiety. Furthermore, when investigating the EEG, we focused on the theta or beta frequency bands. The most significant correlations were global theta reduction associated with fewer symptoms in dim lighting, and increased theta linked to more perceptual anomalies and dissociation in well-lit conditions. Alpha global increase in dim lighting but decreased during mirror-gazing. Decreased alpha in dim lighting was correlated with more perceptual anomalies and dissociation, while decreased alpha in well-lit conditions was associated with fewer anomalies and dissociation. When analysing the ECG, we were able to find that increased heart rate was associated with reduced anomalies and dissociation. Lastly, this study was able to replicate a lot of findings done by previous research, moreover it demonstrated that the MGT is also able to produce dissociative states and anomalous experiences in fully lit condition, thus demonstrating that the dissociative states are due to the MGT and not necessarily dependant on external factors such as sensorial deprivation.

Chronic pain conditions, which affect approximately one in five individuals worldwide, frequently cause visuo-proprioceptive distortion of affected body parts. Virtual reality (VR) is emerging as a promising digital therapeutic due to its capacity to induce immersive bodily illusions and modulate sensory processes related to body perception. By targeting the distorted body perceptions characteristic of certain chronic pain conditions, VR interventions can elicit meaningful analgesia. In parallel, psychoplastogens such as 5-MeO-DMT are receiving increasing attention for their ability to promote neuroplasticity by reshaping maladaptive functional connectivity, suggesting considerable potential in treating chronic pain.

We hypothesize that psychoplastogen-enhanced neuroplasticity will amplify VR’s ability to reorganize self-perception and reduce pain. In the first phase of our proposed experiments, healthy participants will complete VR-based psychophysics tasks concerning their physical and virtual bodies, allowing us to examine changes in body perception as a correlate of acute pain ratings. Building on these findings, the second phase will assess the separate and combined analgesic effects of VR and 5-MeO-DMT in healthy controls and patients with chronic pain, capturing both experiential and physiological markers through subjective measures and neuroimaging techniques in a neurophenomenological framework. By systematically investigating this synergy, the project aims to inform fundamental theories of bodily self-perception and pain modulation. Moreover, the ability of immersive bodily illusions to transiently reconfigure the phenomenal self-model can expand our understanding of consciousness by illuminating the dynamic interplay between neural plasticity, perception, and the sense of corporeal self.

Previous work showed that the Joint Sense of Agency (JSoA) –the sense of conscious control experienced by humans when acting with others– depends on the type of embodied agent we are acting with. Yet, the effect of interacting with human versus artificial bodies on the human body remains an open question. Here we investigate the effect of Depersonalisation (DP) – a condition that makes people feel detached from their self and body - on embodied Joint Sense of Agency in Human/Human versus Human/Artificial other dyads. We have designed a novel Joint Simon Task in Virtual Reality where 100 participants with High versus Low Levels of DP can embody either a Human avatar or a Social Humanoid Robot ‘Pepper’ avatar, then performing the Joint Simon task either together with a Human avatar or a ‘Pepper’ avatar as co-agent.

We hypothesize that participants with High DP will show higher Joint Simon Effect when embodying a robotic ‘Pepper’ avatar. This is because people who feel less connected to their bodies and feel as ‘machines’, or ‘automata’ may develop a higher JSoA while doing a task with another robotic body as opposed to a human body. Our study investigates for the first time the effect of human embodiment on Joint Sense of Agency in Human versus Robotic ‘Pepper’ avatar in Virtual Reality. A better understanding of how feelings of being (dis)connected from one’s body impacts the way people feel (dis)connected from human and artificial others may help us better design human/artificial agents interactions.

Dissociative symptoms are increasingly recognized as transdiagnostic across mental disorders and may result from trauma-related disruptions in interoceptive processing and multisensory integration. However, empirical studies in this area remain scarce. This project addresses a critical gap by investigating the relationship between interoceptive-exteroceptive integration and dissociative symptoms (e.g., depersonalization, derealization, amnesia, absorption, identity fragmentation, and somatoform dissociative symptoms) in the general population.

The study consists of two phases. First, an online screening survey assesses dissociative symptoms using self-report measures, including the Dissociative Experiences Scale, Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire, Cambridge Depersonalization Scale, and Dissociative Symptoms Scale, along with additional measures of trauma-related symptoms and interoception. Participants with varying levels of dissociative symptoms are invited to the second phase.

In the second phase, participants complete two versions of the simultaneity judgment (SJ) task—cardio-auditory and audio-visual—to compare intero-exteroceptive and extero-exteroceptive integration (i.e., temporal binding window [TBW] width) between individuals with varying levels of dissociative symptoms. We hypothesize that TBW width varies with dissociative symptom type and severity. The study is in the data collection stage, and preliminary results will be presented.

This research has theoretical and practical implications, providing insights into the mechanisms underlying altered states of consciousness associated with dissociative symptoms and informing therapeutic interventions targeting multisensory integration in dissociative states.

The experience of home – a silent, transparent background feeling of familiarity, belonging, and stability that shapes our everyday life - is grounded in our embodiment. This relatedness is most profoundly revealed when it is lost. Depersonalization (DP) is a condition characterized by a distressing sense of detachment from the self, body, and world, often accompanied by disruptions in bodily self-awareness and multisensory integration. As a result, individuals with DP report that experiences are permeated by a sense of unreality, alienation and uncanniness. Embodiment and home appear altered.

This study synthesizes research on DP and healthy individuals to develop an embodied intervention aimed at restoring this lost sense of embodiment. By synchronizing bodily movements (cardiac rhythm) and bodily actions (gait) with real-time cardiac feedback, we investigate whether such alignment enhances embodiment, as measured by a Graphesthesia task, through improved multisensory integration. This approach builds on the understanding that bodily states and regulatory processes are foundational to selfhood and the experience of home.

The findings have implications for both theory and practice, offering a novel perspective on the role of embodiment in psychopathology, suggesting dynamic, embodied therapeutic approches. This work aligns with the conference theme by contributing to contemporary discussions on consciousness, selfhood, and the bodily foundations of experience, with potential significance for both national and international research on DP and related disorders.

A tingling in the body, a sense of calm, relaxation and euphoria, are all sensori-emotional experiences often evoked by a phenomenon called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) (Barratt & Davis, 2015; Engelbregt et al., 2022; Fredborg et al., 2021; Poerio et al., 2022). ASMR is reported to be an involuntary and atypical physiological response to certain audio, visual and interpersonal triggers often found in ASMR videos (Barratt & Davis, 2015). This study developed and validated a bank of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) stimuli to address inconsistencies in ASMR research methods. ASMR videos and matched control videos were selected, and participants (N=553) rated them in an online survey. ASMR videos received significantly higher ratings than control videos on the ASMR-15 scale (Roberts et al., 2018), confirming the stimuli's effectiveness in eliciting ASMR responses. Significant differences were found across all subscales, with the sensation subscale showing the largest effect. The study also revealed potential expectancy effects, as control videos presented first received higher ratings, suggesting that prior expectations may influence ASMR experiences. Acoustic analyses of both ASMR and control videos are ongoing, with preliminary results indicating that the ASMR stimuli align with known sound characteristics. This study provides a reliable set of ASMR stimuli for future experimental research, offering a valuable resource to explore ASMR's physiological and psychological effects, as well as its potential applications in mental health interventions.

The full-body illusion (FBI), in which individuals perceive a virtual avatar as their own body, is a key phenomenon in self-recognition research. However, no standardized quantitative index exists to measure its strength. This study explores the validity of postural sway, or changes in the center of pressure (CoP) of the participant’s body, as an objective measure of FBI strength. Previous studies on the rubber hand illusion, a related phenomenon, demonstrated that movements of a fake hand’s fingers can elicit corresponding movements in the participant’s real fingers. Based on this, we hypothesized that changes in an avatar’s posture during the FBI would induce corresponding shifts in the participant’s CoP. In this study, the illusion was induced by simultaneously stroking the backs of the participant and the virtual avatar. We prepared two conditions: one in which the illusion was induced by avatar tracing the participant’s standing body movement, and another in which the illusion was disrupted by the avatar’s movements unrelated to the participant's intentions. In both conditions, the avatar's posture was suddenly and unexpectedly leaned forward six minutes after the illusion induction. We measured the CoP using a stabilometer. The result showed that in the illusion-inducing condition, the avatar's forward lean caused a significant forward shift in the participant's CoP. Thus, the results suggest that changes in the CoP could be an objective index of the FBI strength, reflecting the subjective experience of embodiment.

Full-body illusion (FBI) is the phenomenon of experiencing a virtual avatar as one’s own body. Some studies have shown that avatar users modify their behavior corresponding to their avatars’ features and that the degree of the FBI is related to these modifications. While previous research has focused on the effect of avatar’ s features of appearance, little is known about the effect of the avatar’s narrativity or internal characteristics. This study examines the effect of an avatar’s narrativity induced from contexts on the FBI.

In this experiment, 32 healthy participants experienced an avatar of the strong artificial lifeform in VR. Prior to the VR experience, half of the participants listened to a positive narrative, in which the avatar used its power to protect people, and the other half listened to a negative narrative, in which it used its power inappropriately. The degree of personal familiarity, social desirability, and activism were measured using a questionnaire to evaluate the impressions of the avatar. Sense of Ownership (SoO) and Agency (SoA) were assessed through questionnaires.

A Man-Whitney U test showed that the participants who heard the positive narrative experienced a greater SoA compared to those who heard the negative narrative (p=0.02). Moreover, correlation analysis showed that the factor of the personal familiarity in the positive narrative was related to the greater SoA (r=0.51, p=0.04).

These results suggest that the positivity of the avatar’s narrativity may influence user's SoA while experiencing the avatar.

The mirror self-recognition test is a standard for assessing self-awareness, but it only examines the visual aspect of the Self. The aim of our study is to concurrently explore the development of visual, bodily, and temporal aspects of self-awareness in the second and third years of life. We also investigate whether children with greater exposure to their Self-image (through mirrors, photos, and videos) perform better in behavioral self-awareness tests, as reported by their parents.

Three self-awareness tests completed in the second year of life (first measurement): 1) the Mirror Self-Recognition Test (visual aspect), 2) the Body-as-an-Obstacle Test (bodily aspect), and 3) the Delayed Self-Recognition Test (temporal aspect).

Three self-awareness tests completed in the third year of life (second measurement): 1) the Shadow-Recognition Test (visual aspect), 2) the Door-Choice Test (bodily aspect), and 3) the Delayed Self-Recognition Test (temporal aspect).

We studied 60 children in their second year and found that 73% passed the mirror self-recognition test, and 42% passed the body-as-an-obstacle test. Unlike Povinelli et al. (1996), 27% of 2-year-olds passed the delayed self-recognition test, which is intriguing from a chronosystem perspective. Exposure to Self-image via mirrors, photos, and videos did not correlate with self-awareness, indicating other factors may influence its development. After one year, the same children will be tested again. Findings will be discussed in the context of the chronosystem, considering how self-awareness evolves over time, influenced by the increasing contemporary exposure to Self-image.

Depersonalization is a condition that makes people feel detached from one’s self, body and others. The representation of one’s own face is a salient bodily aspect of self-awareness and identity, and empirical evidence suggests that individuals with depersonalization disorder experience disrupted perception of their faces when viewing themselves in photographs or in the mirror, which has been corroborated by first-person reports. However, no study had yet explored the state of long-term self-face representations stored in visual memory in the context of depersonalization. By visualising how individuals saw themselves “in the mind’s eye”, this study provides the first empirical evidence for a relationship between depersonalization symptoms and impairments in self-face representation. Individuals reporting more frequent and intense depersonalization symptoms had lower self-face representation accuracy, but somewhat counterintuitively, also higher precision and informational content of this representation. These results suggested that individuals with high depersonalization were representing a distinct, but inaccurate, facial identity as themselves. The self-face representations of high-depersonalization participants were rated as visibly more emotionless and younger in appearance than those of low-depersonalisation participants, according to independent raters. These features were found to be specifically related to aspects of depersonalization symptomatology related to anomalous memory experiences. Finally, an intriguing role of interoceptive sensibility was revealed in both self-face representational accuracy and in depersonalization symptoms. These novel results highlight the link between interoceptive and exteroceptive bodily self-awareness and memory processes as important in those individuals who experience distressing feelings of being detached from one’s self, body and the world.

The ability to perceive one's body by integrating internal (interoception) and external (exteroception) percepts is fundamental to bodily self-consciousness (BSC). In schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), disruptions in BSC, termed self-disorders, are prevalent and associated with various symptoms. While the exteroceptive alterations have been extensively investigated, the interoceptive domains remain underexplored. We hypothesize an altered interoception on three levels in SSD compared to healthy controls (HC): self-reported interoceptive sensibility, objective interoceptive accuracy, and neural correlates of interoception. We are recruiting individuals with SSD and age- and gender-matched HC (18-65 years). Participants complete an EEG experiment (with ECG and respiration monitoring) that includes resting-state recordings and a heartbeat counting task (HCT), followed by interoceptive sensibility questionnaires. Patients additionally undergo functional and structural MRI scanning. The HCT measures cardiac interoceptive accuracy, while EEG-derived Heartbeat Evoked Potentials (HEPs) give insight into the neural correlates of interoception.The preliminary analysis (nSSD = 27, nHC = 12) revealed no group differences regarding interoceptive sensibility, interoceptive accuracy, or HEP amplitudes. HEP amplitudes were not modulated by interoceptive attention during the HCT condition. Data collection is ongoing, and the small sample size, particularly for HC, limits statistical power. While HCT has methodological limitations (e.g., reliance on heart rate beliefs), strict instructions were implemented to mitigate this. Notably, the HCT also evaluates the impact of interoceptive attention on HEPs. Future analyses will explore symptom correlations, respiratory interoception, and MRI data focusing on insula. This research enhances the understanding of BSC in SSD and carries potential implications for body-oriented clinical interventions targeting interoception.

Human bodies are highly dynamic systems, constantly moving both inside (e.g., heartbeats) and in the outside world (e.g., footsteps, walking) to secure survival. Bodily self-consciousness crucially depends on the ability to process and couple this dynamic sensory information. Depersonalisation (DP henceforth) is a common phenomenon that makes individuals feel detached from their bodies and as though they do not fully exist, significantly altering their self-consciousness. Previous work has shown that bodily self-consciousness is not rigid; rather, it is constantly updated through dynamic self-related sensory feedback.

We conducted a study investigating the dynamic coupling between bodily movements from inside the body (i.e., cardiac signals) and bodily actions in the world (e.g., walking) in 60 participants with high and low occurrences of DP. Participants were invited to walk while wearing headphones displaying their natural footstep auditory feedback across frequency bands in three conditions (control, high frequency, low frequency), following a procedure from Tajadura-Jiménez and colleagues (2015). In parallel, we recorded participants’ cardiac signals in real time, as well as gait biomechanics, which were used as an implicit measure of changes in perceived body weight across conditions.

We found that in typical controls walking pace is significantly coupled with the systolic cardiac phase, whereas in people detached from their bodies (high DP) this coupling is absent. Our study reveals, for the first time, that real-time cardiolocomotor coupling is altered in DP individuals, with important implications for dynamic body-based potential therapy.

Background:

Voluntary action is linked fundamentally to core aspects of human conscious experience, including selfhood. Recent evidence highlights the crucial role of interoception in shaping the sense of self, with pathophysiological implications across neurological and psychiatric disorders. However, the association between interoception and voluntary action has remained insufficiently characterised.

Methods:

Thirty non-clinical participants engaged in a series of tasks to elucidate this relationship. Interoception was assessed at a perceptual level using convergent methods that included heartbeat detection (tracking and discrimination) tasks, and a self-rated questionnaire. Specifically, participants were ascribed derived measures of interoceptive prediction error, as conceptualised within a predictive coding framework. Electroencephalograms (EEGs) were recorded during the Libet task, in which the participants voluntarily chose to make actions (button press), while noting the time when they first became aware of their intention/decision to act (W-judgment). A Tapping task served as a control, and both tasks evoked EEG readiness potentials.

Results:

During the Libet task, notably over the period preceding the W-judgment time, participants who scored lower on measures of interoceptive prediction error showed greater readiness potential amplitude. This association was more pronounced in comparison to the Tapping task and remained after controlling for potential confounding factors.

Conclusions:

Our findings suggest the mitigation of interoceptive prediction error augments voluntary action and the accompanying sense of voluntariness. Conversely, a greater tendency for interoceptive prediction errors suggesting unresolved interoceptive noise, may hinder the development of voluntary action and experience of voluntariness.

This research explores the experience of embodiment and emotions in healthy adults (HC), long-term meditators (LTM) and people with depersonalisation (DP) experiences. Both LTM and DP subjects usually report the feeling of being detached from one’s experiences. However, while in LTM self detachment experiences are typically positively valenced, in DP they are usually negatively valenced. In order to assess these experiences we utilize the emBODY task (Nummenmaa et al., 2014), a computer-based topographical self-report tool for monitoring emotion-triggered bodily sensations; as well as three questionnaires: Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) (Mehling et al., 2018); Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ-15) (Baer et al., 2008); Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) (Gross & John, 2003). The questionnaires will provide a rich comprehension of the dimensions of embodiment and emotional processing of these populations. The hypothesis of this research is that the bodily sensations deriving from the triggered emotions will be represented differently across the groups, with lower activation in body maps of DP participants, higher activation in LTM, across emotions, compared to HC. It's anticipated lower activation of body maps for positive emotions in DP participants compared to HC and LTM. Finally, it's expected in the related questionnaires (MAIA, FFMQ-15, ERQ) lower scores in DP participants and higher results in LTM, compared to HC. This research can have significant implications worldwide in clinical interventions for DP by affirming the importance of utilizing mindfulness-based and integrative body-focused therapies; and enhance the theoretical comprehension about consciousness, especially the integration between embodiment, emotions and interoception.

Introduction: Emotional stimuli trigger changes in affective states and conscious experience. This study links variability in emotional responses with self-defining traits such as personality, anxiety and interoceptive awareness - i.e. beliefs, attitudes, and self-reported experiences of bodily sensations

Methods: 297 participants (126 females, aged 18–35 years) viewed 25 video clips featuring negative, positive, disgusting, appetizing, or neutral content. After each clip, participants rated their affect (valence, arousal, disgust, and appetite) and marked body sensations on human silhouettes. Additionally, they completed questionnaires assessing interoceptive awareness, anxiety, disgust sensitivity, mood, and personality.

Results: Hierarchical clustering of questionnaire responses revealed three distinct participant groups. The “Body-Unaware” group, with low interoceptive awareness, showed similar affect ratings across emotions, suggesting reduced emotional granularity. The “Body-Aware” group, characterized by high interoceptive awareness and low anxiety, reported more extensive bodily sensations, indicating heightened emotional engagement. The “High Anxiety” group, marked by elevated anxiety and neuroticism, exhibited stereotypical bodily sensation patterns. Each group also showed unique relationships between affect ratings and bodily sensations, moderated by mood.

Discussion: Our findings underscore the embodied nature of emotions and illustrate how conscious reports of affect vary with individual differences in bodily awareness, emotional processing, and traits that contribute to one’s sense of self. This suggests that awareness of bodily sensations shapes subjective emotional experience and contributes to how individuals construct and interpret their self-identity. These insights promise to advance studies on the interplay between interoception, self-related processes, and emotion regulation in both healthy and clinical populations.

The ability to distinguish between our body and the external world is crucial for our sense of self and interaction with our environment. While research suggests that the perceptual clarity of this boundary can vary, precise methods for measuring body boundary perception remain underexplored. In this study, we developed a psychophysical protocol to directly assess how accurately individuals perceive their body boundaries without visual input. 3D scans of the tested regions were used to determine the true body outline, allowing psychometric functions to be fitted. Additionally, we collected self-reported measures related to mental imagery, embodiment, and the frequency of third-person dreams and memories to examine their influence on body boundary perception.

Our results showed that participants demonstrated millimeter-level precision in identifying their body boundaries, even in regions that are mostly flat, such as the palm, or rarely observed, such as the ankle. However, accuracy varied by body region and individual differences in self-reported experiences. Notably, participants who frequently experience third-person dreams performed significantly worse at the task, whereas those who reported more out-of-body experiences showed greater accuracy in judging their ankle boundaries compared to their hand boundaries—a pattern not observed in other participants. Overall, our findings suggest that the dominant perspective one adopts in the mind’s eye plays a significant role in body boundary perception, influencing both its precision and the regions where this accuracy is altered.

In rubber hand illusion (RHI) experiments, participants report experiences of ownership of a fake hand after it is brushed in synchrony with their own hidden hand, with lower ratings for an asynchronous control. Historically, RHI effects have been proposed to arise from the disruption of multisensory mechanisms. An alternative theory proposes that RHI effects are constructed by participants in accordance with their beliefs about the experimental situation. i.e., attributable to phenomenological control (PC; the ability to change experience to meet situational goals). To date, correlational evidence has provided support for this theory. Here, we report the first causal evidence for and against these competing theories. Fifteen high PC participants (top 10% of PC ability) underwent synchronous and asynchronous RHI brushing procedures in two conditions: first with no information about the expected direction of effects and second with imaginative suggestions for RHI experience in asynchronous and not synchronous procedures. Suggestion reversed the pattern of both ownership ratings and of ‘proprioceptive drift’ (a shift in perceived hand position, which was not directly suggested), with greater effects for asynchrony than synchrony. While a second rated experience of touch referred to the fake hand was modulated by suggestion, there was no evidence for or against reversal. PC dominates over multisensory mechanisms in RHI reports of ownership and proprioceptive drift. That phenomenological control may account for reports of these experiences has important implications for theories of the sense of body ownership which draw on multisensory integration accounts of the RHI.

Recent evidence suggests a role of interoceptive processes in the emergence of a minimal, bodily form of self. Albeit often neglected, such a self is a necessary component of any subjective experience, including the conscious perception of our external environment (exteroception). Still, interoceptive and exteroceptive processing are also frequently assumed to compete with each other. These two seemingly opposing views of the interoception/exteroception dynamic, self-related Facilitation and Competition, have guided largely independent lines of research within the field, yet had never been empirically contrasted to this day. In an EEG experiment on heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), the neural response to heartbeats, we manipulated the self-relevance of a simple audio-tactile stimulus by placing it inside or outside of peripersonal space. The design allows the self-related Facilitation and Competition accounts to produce orthogonal predictions. On one hand, the amplitude of pre-stimulus HEPs over the somatosensory cortex slowed down reaction times and affected the stimulus-evoked response in the same area, indicating Competition for shared neural resources. On the other hand, HEP amplitudes over integrative somatomotor and default-mode network regions predicted the effect of self-relevance on reaction times and the stimulus-evoked response, as predicted by the Facilitation account. Importantly, Facilitation and Competition effects were independent: they were driven by distinct neural sources and at different latencies, and were uncorrelated to each other. We show that spontaneous fluctuations in internal bodily monitoring not only reflect shifts in resource allocation, but also independently index the moment-to-moment integration of ongoing processes with a minimal form of self.

Full-body illusion (FBI) demonstrates the malleability of body ownership through multisensory integration. Although bottom-up processes in the FBI are well-documented, the role of top-down factors remain unclear. This study examined how participants’ interpretations of the relationship between their observing self and a virtual body (considered as their self-body) influenced the third-person perspective FBI. Following the predictive coding theory, we conducted a virtual reality-based FBI experiment with 66 participants, who were randomly assigned to either the integration (viewing a virtual body as their own) or separation (viewing a virtual body as a separate self-body) conditions. Both conditions involved synchronous and asynchronous visuo-tactile stimulation. FBI strength was measured using skin conductance responses (SCR) to threat stimuli and an illusion questionnaire. Results demonstrated significant FBI occurrence in the integration condition, with higher SCR during synchronous versus asynchronous stimulation (Z = 2.662, p = .004, r = 0.463), while the separation condition revealed no significant difference. Comparisons across conditions further highlighted stronger illusions in the integration condition (Z = 1.860, p = .031, r = 0.229), supporting the idea that top-down processes influence participants’ experiences of the illusion. These findings extend the predictive coding theory, demonstrating that body ownership emerges from the interplay between sensory inputs and cognitive predictions. These results enhance our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying embodiment, offering insights into the mechanisms of consciousness as they relate to self-perception and multisensory integration.

Overuse injuries, common in endurance and aesthetic sports, occur from repeated physical stress over time (Clarsen et al., 2013). Preventing these injuries is an emerging research area due to its impact on athletes’ health and performance (Mihalko et al., 2021). While the physical development of overuse injuries is well understood, why athletes continue to train despite pain is unclear. Cavallerio et al. (2016) suggest that elite athletes believe they must endure pain to succeed. Though anecdotal reports claim that athletes perceive pain differently, scientific evidence remains contradictory. Whether athletes feel less pain or simply have a different attitude towards it is not yet understood, and more research is needed to improve pain recognition and communication.

Contextual factors can alter pain perception (Keltner et al., 2006). To explore this, we conducted two electrophysiological (EEG) studies to assess how athletes and non-athletes process pain. Study 1 compared brain responses to pain in 20 athletes and 20 controls, showing no differences in pain-related brain activity (N100 and P200 components). Study 2, still in progress, examines how expectations about pain influence brain responses, with 10 athletes and 5 controls exposed to varying pain intensities and expectations.

Initial findings suggest that athletes perceive pain similarly to non-athletes, implying that interventions should address athletes’ attitudes toward pain. Understanding pain processing and improving pain communication can aid in preventing overuse injuries and benefit athletes’ mental health. The prevailing sports culture that stigmatizes pain disclosure needs to change to promote better mental and physical well-being.

The first-person perspective (1PP), referred to the position and orientation from where “I perceive the world”, is a fundamental aspect of bodily self-consciousness. Typically anchored to the physical body, 1PP is altered in an out-of-body experience (OBE), which can be experimentally induced in virtual reality using conflicting multisensory stimulation (Wu et al., 2024). Because objective measures of changes in 1PP remain limited, we here tested if peripersonal Space (PPS) — a multisensory interface surrounding the body — could index changes in 1PP. Earlier data showed that PPS expands against gravity’s direction (Bufacchi & Iannetti, 2016) and is referenced to the experienced self-location (Noel et al., 2015). Here we tested whether virtual graviceptive cues simulating a down-looking perspective would modulate PPS similarly to physical gravitational cues.

In two experiments with the same 30 subjects, we first confirmed that back PPS, measured in audio-tactile task, extended further backward in prone versus supine position (consistent with Bufacchi & Iannetti’s findings). Next, we examined participants’ PPS while exposing them to visuo-vestibular cues designed to induce an OBE-like state. In line with Wu et al., (2024) showing that congruent visuo-vestibular (vs. visual-only) stimulation elicits stronger disembodied feelings, we found that, despite lying supine, participants in the congruent visuo-vestibular condition exhibited a prone-like PPS. These findings suggest that virtual graviceptive cues modulate PPS, as if their bodies had physically turned into prone position, highlight the importance of vestibular cues in 1PP, and suggest a novel implicit way to quantify 1PP changes.

The sense of body ownership is the feeling that our body belongs to us, and it is a central aspect of our sense of self. It is often studied through bodily illusions such as the rubber hand illusion (RHI), which allows for its manipulation in a non-invasive way. Numerous studies have shown that body ownership relies on the integration of visual, tactile, and proprioceptive signals and that brain regions involved in multisensory perception play a key role in this process. Recent research suggests that Body Scan Meditation (BSM), a Mindfulness meditation practice that involves focusing on one’s bodily sensations, may enhance the ability to sense body ownership. In this study, 37 participants were randomly assigned to either follow recorded BSM instructions or perform an active listening task (control group). We recorded their resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) and had them complete an RHI-based psychophysical task designed to objectively assess body ownership sensitivity while also measuring EEG activity. Participants then engaged in daily ~30-minute BSM or active listening training for 14 days before returning to the lab for a second session, where we again recorded resting-state EEG and repeated the RHI-based task. We found higher theta-band connectivity in the BSM group compared to the control group, suggesting enhanced cognitive control. Additionally, alpha-band connectivity negatively correlated with body ownership sensitivity, while theta-band connectivity showed a positive correlation. Overall, our results suggest that BSM training may strengthen top-down modulation processes relevant to body ownership perception.

In this study, we focused on disembodiment using the avatar’s hand in VR environment. Participants were instructed to move their real hands (real hands; RH) during seeing avatar’s hands, which synchronize with the movement of the RH, in an immersive VR scene (virtual hands; VH). They moved their right RH (rRH) slightly up and moved toward their left RH (lRH). In the first four trials, participants stopped their rRH when the rVH reached to the position above the left VH (lVH). Participants lowered their rRH vertically and felt touch between the rRH and the lRH during seeing that the rVH touch the lVH (simple touch). Following three trials, participants performed almost the identical action to the previous four trials in the different experimental blocks. In a condition, the rRH was displaced 7cm to the right of rVH, so that participants had no touch sensation when they saw that the rVH touch the lVH (loss-of-touch). As control, participants lowered their rVH at the position apart from the lVH with/without 7cm-displacement between the rRH and the rVH (simple swing condition with/without displacement). Afterwards, a set of 2 simple touch condition trials and 3 experimental condition (loss-of-touch/simple swing/simple swing with displacement) trials were repeated 5 times. Participants felt stronger "sense of body loss" in the loss-of-touch condition than the two control conditions. Proprioceptive drift occurred when there was displacement between rRH and rVH regardless of conditions. These results suggest the potential to evoke the sense of body loss through visuotactile incongruence in VR.

It is widely known that self-tickling elicits a reduction of ticklish sensation compared to being tickled by the other person. According to the reports in cognitive science, the sense of agency is considered to be a factor to cause this phenomenon. During self-tickling, the ticklish sensation can be induced when a temporal delay is introduced between stimulation and perception that makes temporal prediction impossible. In addition to this, the present study focuses on haptic prediction, assuming that the accordance of tactile stimuli applying to the body and perceived on the body may attenuate ticklish sensations. In order to test the hypothesis, we designed and developed a force-controllable leader-follower system with a force reflecting bilateral control. Using this system, a self-tickling experiment was performed with ten participants under three conditions: (1) with haptic feedback, (2) without haptic feedback, and (3) with the introduction of a temporal delay. The experimental task involved operating the device to poke one’s own underarm five times. Subjective evaluation was conducted using a questionnaire, assessing ticklishness and sense of agency. The experimental results showed no significant difference in ticklishness scores between the conditions with and without haptic feedback. In contrast, a significant difference in ticklishness scores was observed between the condition with a temporal delay and the condition without a delay. These findings suggest that, in self-tickling, the consistency of stimulation timing plays more dominant to cause ticklish sensations rather than that of haptic information.

Growing evidence suggests a bidirectional relationship between cognitive processes and cardiac activity, with embodied theories of consciousness proposing that this interaction may contribute to, or form the basis of, subjective experience. Intersubject correlation of heart rate (ISC-HR) studies suggest that synchronisation of heart rate across individuals reflects shared cognitive processing. Specifically, ISC-HR is thought to require (or reflect) conscious and attentive engagement with a common stimulus, such as listening to the same story or watching the same movie. However, in one study, we observed significant ISC-HR even when participants (n=54) listened to a scrambled story, suggesting that comprehension of a narrative is not necessary for ISC-HR. Here we report a large-scale follow-up ISC-HR study to further delineate the relationship between ISC-HR and conscious experience. For this, we calculated ISC-HR from pulse oximetry data, provided by the Cam-CAN database, collected whilst healthy participants (n=461) watched the 8-minute Alfred Hitchcock movie: “Bang! You’re Dead”. Additionally, we collected suspense ratings from an additional sample of 100 participants, and measured engagement using an auditory Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) performed by another 100 participants while watching the movie. By combining these measures of subjective experience with our heart-rate data, we form a clearer picture of the role of brain-heart interactions in conscious experience. Furthermore, we describe the implications for ISC-HR as a simple yet valuable physiological marker of residual consciousness in behaviourally unresponsive patients with disorders of consciousness following severe brain injury.

This study investigated the relationship between autonomic nervous system fluctuations and thought state transitions, focusing on individual differences in cardiac interoception. Participants completed an auditory attention task while their cardiac activities were continuously monitored. Throughout the task, participants responded to random thought probes that assessed their immediate preceding thought content. Participants selected one of eight categories to classify their immediately preceding thought content and then rated various aspects, including task focus, arousal level, and deliberateness on a scale of 0 to 100. Trial-by-trial thought states were estimated using a hidden Markov model, and the temporal dynamics of thought state transitions were analyzed using multinomial logistic regression. This analysis examined how the interaction between current thought states, mean RR intervals, and individual cardiac interoceptive accuracy predicted subsequent thought state transitions. Results demonstrated that, compared to task focus and mind-blanking thoughts, the maintenance of self-related thoughts (self-related episodic and future thoughts) across consecutive trials was significantly predicted by the interaction between trial-wise mean RR intervals and cardiac interoceptive accuracy. Notably, individuals with higher cardiac interoceptive accuracy showed increased probability of maintaining self-related thoughts during periods of accelerated heart rate. Moreover, individuals with higher cardiac interoceptive accuracy showed stronger influence of concurrent autonomic activity than individual thought tendencies on thought state transitions. These findings suggest that cardiac interoception serves as a regulatory mechanism for thought adjustment in response to real-time cardiovascular changes, with particular specificity for self-referential thought. The study provides novel insights into the physiological mechanisms underlying spontaneous thought dynamics.

Near-death experiences are reported by up to 20% of patients who suffer in-hospital cardiac arrest and are often linked to a surge of high-frequency neurophysiologic oscillations in the brain. However, whether this surge enables the capacity to report the experience or influences survival outcomes remains unclear.

Previous studies suggest that brain-heart electrophysiological interactions reflect both prognosis during the initial comatose period and the level of consciousness in the post-comatose phase. Building on these findings, we hypothesized that brain-heart interactions are critical for life-sustaining mechanisms and that the previously observed electrophysiological surge during near-death is linked to these interactions.

Using a rodent model of reversible anoxia, we examined the relationship between heart and brain responses to asphyxia to evaluate whether brain-heart interactions could predict resuscitation outcomes. Continuous electrocardiography and multi-site local field potential (LFP) recordings were performed on sedated, curarized rats under artificial ventilation (n=29). Anoxia was induced by halting ventilation, and resuscitation was initiated by restoring oxygen.

While 45% of the rats recovered cortical activity comparable to baseline, the others succumbed to cardiac arrest. Rats with positive outcomes showed a reduced surge in high-frequency somatosensory responses and an increased surge in cardiac vagal activity. Notably, the degree of coordination between increased cardiac vagal activity and reduced brain activity in the thalamus, hippocampus and somatosensory cortex strongly predicted survival.

These findings highlight the potential of brain-heart interactions to understand the neurobiology of near-death, and their connection to the brain's ability to sustain consciousness after critical episodes.

Space and time perception are fundamentally inescapable features of all our conscious perceptions. Depersonalization (DP) is a very common condition characterized by distressing feelings of estrangement from the self and the external world. Previous work showed that peripersonal space perception is disrupted in schizophrenia but not in DP, on the other hand, time perception is disrupted both in DP and schizophrenia. Why this asymmetry? Is time perception more central to the sense of self than space perception? To better understand the specificities of DP, a comprehensive picture of time and space perception disruptions in this population is needed.

To address this gap, we have conducted an online study (N = 1034) investigating the relation between HIGH DP traits measured by the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS > 50) and altered subjective experiences of body, time, and space perception. The results demonstrated significant relationships between HIGH DP scores and distorted experiences of time, body and space. Looking at the shared variance between CDS facets “Anomalous Body Experience”, we found that altered body perception remains the most important predictor of spatiotemporal disruption experiences, with a slowing of subjective perception of time.

Altogether, these results suggest that the distorted spatiotemporal experiences observed in DP may mainly come from experiences of estrangement from the bodily self. Thus, the body sets the pace of inner felt subjectivity. Our work calls for further investigations linking DP to disruption of internal/external clock and also in relation to active movements in the world.

Uploading identity refers to the thesis that a biological agent at Time 0 can continue its personal identity in a computational agent at Time 1 (Cerullo, 2015). Though it originates in metaphysical discussions, the concept has far-reaching practical implications (Chalmers, 2010). This work examines the minimal empirical conditions for branching identity to be possible. We begin by considering the spatiotemporal constraints, emphasizing that uploading must be understood as a case of branching, in which any computational agent at Time 1 continues from the biological agent at Time 0 but not beyond that point. We then discuss the concept of personal identity as it pertains to uploading, proposing that the classical notion of numerical identity can be reduced to the sense of personal identity within conscious experience (Klein & Nichols, 2012). Furthermore, we assess different empirical predictions regarding the mechanistic nature of consciousness, showing that uploading identity is not possible under the predictions of all major accounts except for a strong version of computational functionalism (Piccinini, 2010). This version maintains that conscious mental states are equivalent to computational states without relying on emergent properties (Butlin & Long, 2023; Graziano, 2024), suggesting that functional continuity achieved through a fine-grained simulation of the computations underlying the biological agent's sense of personal identity could support uploading. After critically evaluating opposing computationalist perspectives, including implementationalism and mortal computation views (Shiller, 2024; Kleiner, 2024; Dung & Kersten, 2024), we conclude that while uploading identity faces significant empirical constraints, current evidence does not rule out its possibility.

The full-body illusion refers to the phenomenon where users perceive the avatar’s body as their own. Some studies indicated that the illusion leads to a transfer of the avatar’s traits to the users and has an effect on changes in the user’s cognitive performance and behavior such as prosocial behavior. However, it is still unclear whether an avatar can modulate physical performance. This study examined whether embodying a heroic avatar, associated with strength and bravery, enhances physical abilities. Moreover, we investigated the relationship between the physical modulation and changes in subjective experiences.

Twelve male participants (21.0 ± 1.32 years) used a heroic avatar and fought against monsters in VR. To evaluate the changes in physical performance and psychological traits, grip strength, physical perseverance, agility, a sense of balance, and the Courage Measure (CM-J) were measured before and after the VR experience. To examine subjective changes, interviews were conducted during the experience, and post-experience questionnaires were administered. Phenomenological control (PCS-J) was also measured to assess individual traits related to generating illusory experiences. The results showed significant increases in physical perseverance and CM-J scores following the VR experience. Additionally, PCS-J scores were positively correlated with perceived physical changes, and a marginal correlation was found between perceived physical change and CM-J score. Subjective reports also indicated notable changes in the sense of embodying a hero. These findings suggest that embodying a heroic avatar may enhance both physical abilities and courage, influenced by individual phenomenological control.

Human faces contain multiple attributes, including information about configuration, emotion, and intention. While the visual system is specially attuned to detect and recognise human faces, the order in which it extracts meaningful attributes—and the extent to which this extraction occurs in the absence of awareness—is largely unknown. Here, we used a novel LCD tachistoscope that enables visual presentations as brief as 0.002 ms to determine the minimal exposures required for the visual system to extract information about facial configuration and emotional expression by combining psychophysical, electroencephalographic (EEG), and electromyographic (EMG) markers of emotional processing, as well as markers of conscious awareness. Importantly, we combined EEG measures of perceptual emotion processing (i.e., markers that distinguish between emotional and non-emotional stimuli) with EMG measures of embodied emotion processing (i.e., facial mimicry of emotional expressions). We found that both perceptual and embodied markers of emotional processing emerged with 4 ms of exposure—a duration that was sufficiently long to also elicit psychophysical and EEG markers of conscious awareness. Our findings suggest that the processing of facial emotion does not occur in the absence of awareness but rather arises alongside it. Furthermore, our findings challenge the hypothesis that facial mimicry—a phenomenon believed to be critical for empathy and social communication—occurs unconsciously by showing that facial mimicry unfolds as emotional information enters awareness.

Central results in the neuroscience of volition demonstrated that the readiness potential (RP) begins before people consciously decide to move, leading to claims that all voluntary action is initiated unconsciously. However, those original studies focused on arbitrary decisions, and it remains contested whether their results generalize to deliberate choices, which are at the heart of the free-will debate. In particular, some studies found RP differences between arbitrary and deliberate actions while others did not. Yet, critically, prior studies tested the influence of arbitrary and deliberate decisions on the RP using divergent tasks, and no unifying study accounted for these fundamental variations among tasks.

Here we present a comprehensive meta-analysis of EEG studies that measure the RP in volitional tasks. Based on predefined philosophical and methodological criteria, studies were categorized on a continuum: arbitrary, near-arbitrary, ambiguous, and deliberate. RP waveforms were compared across studies at RP onset, peak negativity, and movement time. We found clear RP differences between deliberate tasks and the other categories, demonstrating that RP dynamics differ depending on the nature of the decision.

Our study highlights the urgent need to refine the classification of volitional tasks in RP research. A more precise task-categorization framework will help compare future studies and will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the relation between conscious deliberation, neural precursors of action, and the emergence of volitional choice.

Subjectivity is probably the most central property of conscious experience. Any given subjective experience is experienced from first-person perspective, feels unified to the subject of experience, and is endowed with an intrinsic mineness. How can neuronal mechanisms account for those properties? I will present the neural subjective frame, a proposal where subjectivity relies on brain-body interactions - more precisely, interoceptive signals coming from the heart or the stomach would act in the brain as an unconscious glue to bind together distributed information into a conscious, unified experience, of the external world or of mental contents. I will show that this proposal is backed up by experimental evidence in humans, coming from experimental situations as varied as resting state and spontaneous thoughts, vision at threshold, perspective taking or subjective preferences for cultural goods.

Perceptual content is substantially colored by prior beliefs according to predictive processing. Some priors are particularly ‘stubborn’, as exemplified by bistable perception paradigms such as binocular rivalry: a phenomenon triggered when distinct stimuli overlap spatio-temporally, resulting in perceptual alternation rather than a veridical continuous mixed percept. Eastern contemplative traditions propose techniques to reduce the influence of priors and expand the boundaries of conscious perception. In this study, we examined whether volitional control over rivalry is possible via meditation-induced attention modulation. Twenty-four advanced meditators were exposed to flickering rivalry stimuli in focused attention (FA), open monitoring (OM) and no-meditation conditions, each consisting of self-report, no-report, and localizer blocks. We hypothesized FA – by upweighting attention to the currently perceived stimulus – would increase individual percept duration, whereas OM – by being attentive equally to all aspects of experience – would induce longer mixed percepts. This, in turn, should decrease perceptual switches in both meditation conditions. Switches were computed using behavioral self-reports and two complementary EEG analysis methods: frequency-tagging and pattern-classification. In line with the hypotheses, behavioral reports revealed fewer switches in both meditation conditions. However, frequency-tagging estimated switch rates showed no effect of meditation in self-report blocks; in no-report blocks, switches increased only with FA. Interestingly, initial pattern-classification results show high decoding accuracy and high correlation between estimated switches and self-reports in the no-meditation condition, demonstrating a potential for rivalry-tracking. Results from larger sample will be presented to illuminate the extent to which control over conscious perception is possible through meditation.

A growing body of theoretical and empirical work posits complexity science as a powerful approach for consciousness research, yielding remarkable results in characterizing global conscious states. However, neural complexity in meditation remains underexplored, existing literature yielding seemingly ambiguous results.

To address this gap we combine two complementary efforts: 1) a systematic literature review on neural complexity in meditation; 2) a MEG neuro-phenomenological study (n=45) exploring Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZc) and Transfer Entropy (TE) in waking rest vs. meditative states of maintaining and reducing self-boundaries.

Our review shows increased complexity in meditation vs. rest (d=0.6) and a trend of decreased baseline (trait) complexity following regular meditation practice. Accordingly, our empirical results show widespread LZc increases in meditation vs.rest (t=6.15, p<0.001), and specific orbitofrontal cortex decrease highly correlated (r=-0.64, p<0.001) with self-dissolution phenomenology. Similarly, TE increases globally in meditation vs. rest (t=5.98, p<0.001), while specific TE decreases in default-mode and fronto-parietal networks correlate with self-dissolution phenomenology (r=-0.46, p<0.01).

Our review and novel analysis both confirm meditation as a global conscious state characterized by increased neural complexity, yet highlight nuance showing subtle phenomenological aspects correlate with localized reductions in complexity. Although further theoretical work is needed, these findings align with predictive processing hypotheses, suggesting meditation may reduce high-level priors while increasing precision-weighting of sensory input. Taken together, our findings both solidify existing evidence and shed new light on the neuroscience of consciousness, highlighting meditation as a unique state where the interplay of global and local patterns of neural complexity underlie a unique phenomenology.

Meditation includes contemplative practices that are informed by ancient wisdom traditions. Interest in meditation, and particularly mindfulness, is burgeoning, and it has been shown to be effective in improving mental and physical health. Our Meditation Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School is leading investigations into advanced meditation, that is, skill, states, stages, and transformations that unfold with meditation mastery and practice over time. We will present several of our recent studies including using human electrophysiology (MEG-EEG) and neuroimaging (7T MRI) combined with neurophenomenological approaches to examine the neuroscience and phenomenology of advanced concentrative absorption, insight, and meditative endpoints including jhana, vipassana, and cessation. Absorption is characterized by profound ecstasy, clarity, and openness; insight includes perceived deep understanding of one’s self and mind; and cessation is complete discontinuation of consciousness. We have intensively sampled these states and events in cohorts of advanced meditators. Our results include spectral power, linear and non-linear connectivity, graph network, directed information, entropy, machine learning, microstates, and criticality insights derived from electrophysiology; and activity, static and dynamic connectivity, graph network, gradient, and eigenmode insights derived from whole-brain 7T fMRI (including brainstem and cerebellum). By relating advanced meditation to objective and intrinsic measures of the brain and rich phenomenology, these results provide powerful evidence for advanced meditators voluntarily and radically modulating their own consciousness. These studies lay foundations for studying these unique states using neuroscience toward health-related applications in both clinical and non-clinical contexts, and deep insights in the science of consciousness.

Introduction.

Hypnosis, a form of top-down regulation that can produce pronounced changes in consciousness, provides a valuable model to test theoretical frameworks such as the Global Neuronal Workspace theory (GNWT). We leveraged two hypnotic paradigms (deafness and blindness) to examine GNWT’s predictions: (1) preservation of the early (<200ms) perceptual processing predicted to correspond to an unconscious stage; (2) abolished or severely reduced late-stage of processing predicted to index conscious access (late ERP component and time-generalization measures); (3) decreased long-range functional connectivity reflecting decoupling between GNW and the corresponding sensory area.

Methods

We reanalyzed two existing odd-ball EEG datasets from healthy volunteers with varying hypnotic suggestibility. The first (auditory) included 45 subjects (23 highly suggestible) tested under baseline and hypnotic deafness; the second included 60 subjects (20 highly suggestible) tested under baseline and hypnotic blindness. We assessed stimulus-induced responses (ERPs, time-frequency, and temporal decoding) as well as ‘state markers’ (spectral power, algorithmic complexity, and functional connectivity).

Results

Results were consistent across modalities. Crucially, as predicted, late-stage (>300 ms) stimulus-induced activity was significantly reduced in hypnotic conditions (as revealed by ERPs, time-frequency, and temporal decoding analyses), while early (<300 ms) processing was unaffected. Moreover, in highly suggestible individuals, hypnosis modulated algorithmic complexity and functional connectivity, whereas low suggestible individuals showed no significant changes.

Discussion

These findings support GNWT predictions that hypnosis acts by modulating late-stage neural processing, although alternative interpretations remain possible.

The subjective experience of time flowing forward remains one of consciousness's most puzzling features. While predictive processing theories suggest this experience emerges from the brain "distrusting the present" in anticipation of predicted changes (Hohwy et al., 2016), the precise computational mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain unclear. Here, we propose that continuous Bayesian model comparison between the hypothesis "the world changed" and the null "did-not-change" is a fundamental mechanism of perception through which temporal consciousness emerges. Our framework builds on a hierarchical event-based architecture (Zakharov et al., 2022) where the perceptual system continuously evaluates evidence for environmental change versus stability. This process implements the theoretical notion of "distrusting the present" through concrete probabilistic computation. Importantly, this mechanism serves multiple crucial functions: it enables event-based perception by segmenting continuous experience into discrete events, promotes optimal hierarchical organization of perceptual processing into naturally evolving nested timescales, and enables energy efficiency. When implemented in machine learning systems, this architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance in compression and video prediction tasks, suggesting its fundamental computational importance. Combined with previous work on surprise-based duration estimation (Fountas et al., 2022), our model accounts for how we segment continuous experience and process duration while also elucidating why consciousness exhibits its characteristic temporal flow. Furthermore, it suggests testable predictions about how alterations in this hypothesis-testing process might manifest in conditions with disturbed temporal awareness, such as depression (Kent et al., 2019). This work bridges computational and philosophical approaches to temporal consciousness, offering a unified account of time perception and its phenomenology.

Self-recognition is possible from minimal kinematic cues. We have recently identified frontoparietal nodes of the Action Observation Network (AON) preferentially engaged by minimal kinematic cues from actions of the self (Kadambi et al., 2025). Here, we investigate whether this ability to infer self-identity from movement relates to motor imagery ability—an index of motor simulation—and its corresponding neural basis. Using multivariate decoding and functional localizer analyses, we examined self-recognition performance across core nodes of the AON (Inferior Parietal Lobules, IPL; Inferior Frontal Gyri, IFG; Extrastriate Body Area, EBA; Superior Temporal Sulci, STS) and measured their relationships with motor imagery ability. Self-specific decoding emerged in the IFG and IPL, while the EBA decoded between all identities (self, friend, stranger). The IPL and EBA were functionally connected during self-recognition and their decoding accuracy was associated with motor imagery. These findings suggest a relationship between motor imagery and self-action recognition, at least for minimal kinematic cues, that emerges from interactions between IPL and EBA, expanding our understanding of cortical systems relevant to both.

Introduction: Episodic memory retrieval is often accompanied by autonoetic consciousness (ANC) — the vivid feeling of mentally re-experiencing past events. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenological experience are still poorly understood. The hippocampus is central to memory retrieval, coordinating the reactivation of cortical regions which were involved during event encoding. Such reinstatement effects have been shown to take place in sensory cortices (auditory, visual) but the specific role of motor inputs in ANC remains unknown. In the present study we investigated whether motor signals and their cortical representation, generated by movements at encoding, are reinstated at retrieval and whether this contributes to ANC.

Methods: 54 participants encoded real-life-like events in a 3D immersive mixed reality environment, performing motor actions. The following day participants came back and were asked to freely retrieved each of these events while their brain (study 1, n=30, fMRI), or muscle (study 2, n=24, EMG) activity was being recorded.

Results: We observed memory-related activations in regions such as the hippocampus, parahippocampus, and critically, the motor cortex. Additionally, activity in motor areas was linked to the intensity of participants’ re-experiencing of events. We also showed that hippocampus to motor cortex functional connectivity was enhanced during free retrieval. Finally, we observed motor reinstatement at the peripheral level, with EMG ongoing activity of a muscle being higher during retrieval of episodes which engaged that particular muscle at encoding.

Conclusion: This study underscores the role of motor context in the phenomenology of ANC, highlighting the enacted nature of memory retrieval.

As a 2-dimensional system, the skin shows certain analogies with the external environment. Both contain boundaries and landmarks, and both can be navigated. We here tested whether the brain mechanisms known to encode our trajectories in external space, i.e. grid-cells, can also encode the trajectory of a stimulus travelling across the skin.

In this fMRI experiment, the experimenter drew lines on the back of the participants' hands (n=29). We then looked for the BOLD signature characteristic of grid cells (Doeller et al 2008). We initially found no grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, the region typically showing grid cell activity during spatial navigation. However, tactile perception is known to exhibit distortions related to the oval shape of tactile receptive fields (Longo & Haggard 2011), a property known as tactile distance anisotropy. After distorting the stimulation space according to each individual’s level of tactile anisotropy, measured in a separate task, we found the characteristic signature of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex. In the somatosensory cortex, we also observed the signature of grid cells for the anisotropic space, as well as for the original non-deformed stimulation space but less robustly.

These results demonstrate that the cognitive mechanisms used for encoding external space are also used for encoding skin space, a space that is directly experienced from the inside, here navigated by an external agent. This grid code is constrained by the properties of the tactile system, suggesting that it corresponds to a sensory grid code.

Inferences about the neural bases of subjective experience often rely on reports that participants express whilst performing a task. However, different studies suggest that reports bias such inferences, contaminating the neural correlates of consciousness. More recently, no-report paradigms have been developed but the involvement of attention in such tasks remains unknown.

Here, 32 adults were presented with 60 EEG frequency-tagging sequences composed of various images presented at 6 Hz and all degraded to a supraliminal contrast. In these sequences, male or female faces were also tagged at the specific frequency of 1.2 Hz. Concurrently, participants were asked to detect the color change of a fixation cross on the images to monitor their attention. At the end of each sequence, participants were instructed to estimate the subjective visibility of the faces (using the Perceptual Awareness Scale - PAS), to categorise their gender (measure of objective visibility), and to assess their confidence in this categorisation (measure of metacognition).

Mixed-effect models revealed that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the face frequency increased linearly with PAS and confidence. Conversely, the SNR at the image frequency reflecting attentional processes only increased with confidence. This was confirmed by the concurrent attentional task where performance only increased with confidence, but not with PAS.

Overall, this data shows that frequency-tagging is sensitive to subjective experience in the absence of reports during the sequence presentation. They also suggest that attentional processes are less involved in subjective visibility than in metacognition.

Cyclic variations of baroreceptor activity (BRA) across the cardiac (systole/ diastole) and respiratory (inhalation/ exhalation) can modulate cortical excitability and so influence perceptual awareness.

To determine how these bodily signals modulate awareness-related brain activity, we presented visual stimuli at the discrimination threshold and compared ERPs and their intracranial sources when subjects correctly identified the stimuli with and without awareness as a function of the cardiac and respiratory phases. The earliest marker of awareness was the P1 (90-120 ms) for low BRA (diastole/ inhalation) and the VAN (250-350 ms) for high BRA (systole/ exhalation). Moreover, activity spread from the primary visceral cortex (posterior insula) to parietal cortices during high and from associative interoceptive centers (anterior insula) to the prefrontal cortex during low BRA indicating that bodily signals modulate the pathway to awareness.

Respiration can affect awareness both directly through the entrainment of cortical activity by the mechanical stimulation of the olfactory bulb (OB) and indirectly through respiratory sinus arrythmia, which is partly modulated by BRA. To determine the mechanism underlying the influence of respiratory phase on awareness, we repeated the experiment during oral breathing when OB stimulation is greatly reduced, and BRA is preserved. Here, the P1 component was not modulated by awareness, but the P3a was obtained when BRA is low indicating an interaction between OB stimulation and BRA: only when both OB stimulation is present and BRA is low, the P1 the earliest ERP component modulated by awareness, revealing a complex interplay between bodily signals and awareness-related brain activity.

In the context of conscious decision-making, the distinction between intention and foresight shapes how we judge actions in ethics and law. Consider a doctor administering a high-dose painkiller to a terminally ill patient, who dies as a consequence of the medication. Whether the doctor is criminally liable depends on whether they intended for the patient to die or just foresaw this consequence as a side effect of pain relief. To uncover whether the critical distinction between the mental states of intention and foresight is associated with distinct neural signatures, we recorded EEG while participants performed a task inspired by the game Frogger, where their actions varied in intentionality and expectedness (foresight).

We found that the feedback-related negativity (FRN) was stronger for intended outcomes, while the P3 increased for unexpected results—suggesting these signals track intention and foresight, respectively. However, neither ERP component uniquely reflected only one of those mental states. Nevertheless, effect-matched spatial filtering identified a distinct neural pattern that may better separate intention from foresight.

Hence, intending a specific consequence of an action and foreseeing that consequence may rely on different neural mechanisms. This lends empirical weight to the “doctrine of double effect”—which argues that foreseen but unintended harm may be morally permissible. We propose a follow-up study that explores the neural signature of causing harm to another person, comparing foresight of harm to intention to harm. This line of research demonstrates again how basic research in the neuroscience of consciousness has practical implications in ethics and law.

Is motor-cortical neuronal activity during movement preparation hard-wired or under conscious control? An intracranial study in humans.

After more than a century and a half of research, much about the functional role of motor cortex remains unknown. In particular, it is not well understood how much the neuronal activity leading up to movement is hard-wired versus under conscious, volitional control. Working with four human participants implanted with intracranial electrodes in motor and somatosensory cortex, our machine-learning classifier found spiking patterns that were highly predictive of upcoming movement in real time (~80% accuracy). We then investigated two research questions. First, to what extent can humans alter their motor-preparatory neuronal activity before a specific movement and still carry out that movement? Second, how similar is the pre-movement neuronal pattern for the same movement under different cognitive contexts?

Participants played a strategic game, where their objective was to flip as much slime as possible from a slow-filling bucket on a virtual “robot” opponent before it flipped the bucket on them. The robot was activated by the real-time classifier that indicated the participant’s intention to move. Hence, to win, participants needed to alter their preparatory neuronal activity. However, in multiple sessions over days and weeks, participants lost to the robot on more than 80% of the trials. Moreover, the classifier predicted movement just as well in a different setting, when participants scrolled through visual content in a self-paced manner. Our study thus provides evidence for hard-wired motor-preparatory neuronal activity in motor cortex rather than conscious control.

Understanding the temporal dynamics of intention formation is crucial for uncovering the neural basis of decision-making. Here, we leveraged the suggestibility of subjective reports to implicitly track the time course of intention formation. Forty-two participants were led to believe that their brain activity was monitored by a sophisticated AI which could predict their upcoming actions. In reality, random predictions were presented during their deliberation process, and participants reported whether these predictions were correct. Notably, predictions shown early in deliberation were reported as accurate more often than chance, with this effect diminishing as the decision moment approached, β=-0.084, SE=0.040, t(43.818)=-2.130, p=0.039. This pattern suggests that suggestibility decreases as the intention strengthens over time. The onset of intention, estimated using this method, aligned more closely with neural data compared to traditional explicit reporting methods. These findings highlight the utility of suggestibility as a tool for investigating the formation and time course of mental events and offer a promising avenue for studying the interplay between subjective experience and neural activity.

Mind wandering (MW) is a mental state process which has been correlated to prefrontal executive function and local theta synchronisation. Here we investigated whether transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) at a theta-frequency over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) may causally enhance attention and executive control during a MW task. Using a block design, a cohort of human participants received rhythmic (7Hz), arrhythmic, and sham TMS while performing a finger-tapping task (FTRSGT) engaging executive control. In two counterbalanced TMS-EEG sessions, participants reported their attentional state via thought probes and objective measures of approximate entropy (AE) and behavioural variability (BV), indexing executive control and temporal attention, respectively.

Behavioural measures supported task validity: AE increased during on-task states while BV showed the opposite pattern, thereby linking subjective reports to objective measures of attention. Results show that rhythmic TMS induced a global increase in scalp theta power and enhanced intra-trial coherence (ITC) of theta, alpha and beta rhythms. EEG electrodes near the DLPFC exhibited significantly higher theta power and ITC during and immediately following stimulation, suggesting successful local theta-entrainment. Group-level analysis revealed that at the group level participants reported higher levels of attention (though-probes) during rhythmic theta-TMS blocks compared to arrhythmic, suggesting enhanced attention under theta entrainment. At this stage, no significant differences emerged for BV, AE or the remaining thought-probes. Future analysis will determine the correlations between subjective and objective MW reports across conditions, as well as dynamic changes in BV and AE in relation to subjective attention and EEG-modulated activity.

Mind-wandering (MW) is a mental state occupying 30–50% of waking time, where attention drifts away from the task at hand. This phenomenon has been linked to sustained attention and executive function (EF), but this relationship remains unclear. Here we hypothesized that modulating neural oscillations in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) with theta-frequency transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS, 7 Hz) would enhance sustained attention and reduce MW. To this end, we delivered tACS to the DLPFC and assessed temporal attention and cognitive control using a finger-tapping task (FT-RSGT). We expected increases in approximate entropy (AE, a proxy for cognitive control) and reductions in behavioral variability (BV, a proxy for attention) during tACS compared to SHAM and transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) conditions. Additionally, we expected participants to report being more "on-task" (via thought probes) and to exhibit larger pupil sizes, indicating increased arousal.

Our findings show significant BV reductions and increased pupil size when participants were on-task, with opposite patterns when off-task. However, AE did not differ significantly between on-task and off-task states, nor did AE or BV vary across stimulation conditions. Unexpectedly, tACS reduced attention scores compared to tRNS and SHAM. Pupil diameter increased during tACS and decreased during tRNS, suggesting theta stimulation uniquely influences arousal. Theta and alpha power increased post-tACS, and higher theta power was linked to off-task states. These results suggest that while theta DLPFC stimulation affects arousal, its impact on EF and MW requires further investigation, focusing on interindividual variability in attentional responses.

Accurate assessment of residual auditory function in patients with severe acute brain injuries, from acute coma to prolonged states, is crucial for clinical decision-making. Recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility of simultaneous recording of auditory evoked responses at multiple levels for comprehensive assessment of the auditory hierarchy. However, an approach that achieves both high sensitivity and reliability in detecting individual-level responses has yet to be established. We propose a frequency-tagged roving paradigm employing two amplitude-modulated tones (carrier frequencies 220/440 Hz modulated at 40/80 Hz) as both standard and deviant stimuli. This design enables concurrent recording of brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs), auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs), and cortical event-related potentials (ERPs). Using an optimized two-channel recording setup (Fz and Cz), we tested this paradigm on 30 healthy participants using a roving design to minimize adaptation effects while maintaining efficient assessment of change detection. Our results demonstrate 100% sensitivity in eliciting high-frequency FFRs and gamma-band ASSRs, as verified through spectral analysis with permutation tests. Machine learning classification successfully distinguished stimulus conditions from resting state in the N1-P2 complex across all participants. For mismatch pairs, ascending transitions predominantly elicited N1-P2 responses (30/30 participants), while descending transitions evoked MMN (28/30 participants). Systematic analysis of recording duration revealed that with 30 minutes of recording, the paradigm achieved 93.33% sensitivity across all components. These findings validate our frequency-tagged roving paradigm as an efficient approach for comprehensive assessment of the auditory hierarchy, offering potential advantages in both research and clinical applications where rapid yet reliable evaluation is desired.

A dynamic stimulus presented to one eye can suppress a static target in the other for long periods (continuous flash suppression: CFS). The suppressed target eventually becomes visible and this duration (bCFS) is often used to index unconscious processing. Controversially, faster breakthroughs are considered evidence of visual processing without awareness while opponents claim breakthrough times simply vary with low-level stimulus properties. bCFS times alone cannot solve this: suppression thresholds are needed as a baseline to compare with breakthrough thresholds. Our new ‘CFS tracking’ paradigm (tCFS) quickly measures contrast thresholds for breakthrough and suppression so that suppression strength can be calculated for any image. Participants simply track their changing perceptual states as a suppressed image steadily increases in contrast until visibility (i.e., breakthrough) and then decreases until re-suppression is reported, then increases again (and so on, in a continuing cycle). Using tCFS we confirm that: (i) there are some differences in breakthrough thresholds across target types (e.g., grating vs face), as bCFS has shown, but (ii) suppression thresholds show a parallel pattern of differences, thus (iii) suppression strength is the same for all images (~14-15 dB for gratings, noise, objects, food, faces, biological motion). Uniform CFS suppression strength indicates a single mechanism of CFS suppression, likely early in visual cortex where left and right eyes combine, and prior to processing of objects and image identity. Using the tracking paradigm with binocular rivalry reveals half as much suppression: ~7-8 dB.

Prior studies have shown that (a) a target’s colour information and form information, can be processed without awareness and (b) that unconscious colour processing occurs at early levels in the cortical information processing hierarchy.

Recently, a narrative system has been proposed as an extension to models of consciousness (Lau, 2021). However, it has also been proposed but not tested, that the coherence-seeking narrative system only takes into account what one is conscious of.

In a novel task design, we are testing whether we can dissociate a perceptual choice (immediate response given to the presentation of 3 different visual cues: semantic prime, colour and shape prime, from the integration of exactly the same visual cues into the narrative system (choosing 1 out of 4 available narratives that features none to all visual cues).

In the task, information is presented just below and just above the conscious threshold, so that subliminal and supraliminal trials can be dissociated and the integration of all visual cues into perceptual choice and narrative system can be tested. Thus, we can dissociate information integration into perception and narrative system (justifying the perceptual choice).

We show that there is clear separation between information being integrated into a perceptual choice, but not into the narrative, when presented below threshold for normal observers; while the reverse has been shown for psychotic observers, where more subliminally presented information made it into the narratives, however, there was less coherence / more mismatches between perception and the narratives themselves.

According to the Partial Awareness Hypothesis (Kouider & Dupoux, 2004), some low-level features of presumably subliminal stimuli (e.g., letter shapes) may be consciously perceived by participants in experiments investigating unconscious perception. Such partial awareness may be insufficient for participants to report stimulus visibility, yet it could still activate semantic networks involved in processing of adequate words (or other presented stimuli). As a result, conscious partial perception is a potential explanation for the effects reported in unconscious perception experiments

In this study, we conducted Dehaene et al.'s (1998) experiment, in which reactions to target numbers were influenced by masked numbers. The experiment included two conditions: (1) the exact replication (REP condition) and (2) the eliminated partial awareness condition (EPA condition). In the REP condition, all experimental settings were identical to those in the original study. In the EPA condition, the presentation duration of masked numbers was calibrated individually for each participant in such a way that they had no partial awareness of the stimuli.

We tested 52 participants. In the REP condition, 70% of participants exhibited partial awareness of the masked stimuli. On average, the calibrated duration of the masked stimuli in the EPA condition was 17 ms shorter than in the REP condition. We found no priming effects in the EPA condition, whereas the original priming effect was replicated in the REP condition. These results suggest that partial awareness was responsible for the effects observed in the original experiment, raising questions about the interpretation of studies on unconscious perception.

Visual categorisation of faces, bodies, or scenes relies on partially segregated cortical networks in humans and monkeys. Although the apex of this process has traditionally been ascribed to downstream areas, such as the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and infero-temporal (IT) regions, emerging evidence suggests that early visual areas also provide foundational input for category selectivity via recursive processing. For example, distinct neural subpopulations for faces and bodies are interspaced in occipital areas as early as the primary visual cortex (V1). While category selectivity has been demonstrated in the absence of V1 in humans, few comparative analyses exist in non-human primates. It thus remains unknown how V1 damage modulates both overall neural activity and category-specific responses.

To address this gap, we longitudinally investigated percent-signal change (PSC) across stimulus categories in two rhesus macaques using a contrast-enhanced fMRI protocol before and after a unilateral V1 lesion. We employed a 4 (categories) × 3 (locations) factorial design, presenting central images (15° diameter) of monkey faces, bodies, objects, and their phase-scrambled counterparts at three visual field locations (central and peripheral in the lower left and right quadrants at 17° eccentricity).

Our results reveal that a common neural circuit remains active both pre- and post-lesion. Notably, STS-IT regions that normally exhibit robust category-specific responses lose their selectivity post-lesion. When V1 is compromised, some downstream regions maintain significant activity—albeit with reduced intensity and specificity— but lose their category specificity. These findings highlight the importance of local specialisation and long-range recursive interactions in preserving category discriminability.

Unconscious rewards have been reported to drive behavior, which implies that motivation for action could be processed outside of awareness. Here, we focus on a seminal study by Pessiglione and colleagues (2007) showing that subliminal monetary rewards influence the amount of effort that participants invest in a task. Masked pictures of one pound and one penny coins were shown for variable durations. Participants were rewarded a proportion of the presented coin matching the amount of force they exerted on a handgrip. In a follow-up task, participants reported the identity and visibility of the stimuli. Stimuli lasting up to 50ms were reported to be processed unconsciously. Nonetheless, across all stimulus durations, participants could successfully exert more force when higher rewards were at stake. Similar effects were reported for galvanic skin responses and BOLD responses linked to reward processing.

Given the implications of these results for theories of consciousness and motivation, we set out to replicate it - first by totally adhering to the original protocol (except for the replacement of fMRI with electroencephalography), and, in a successive step, by implementing state-of-the-art methods. At the conference, we will present results from the first study. We could not find behavioral evidence that coin stimuli could be perceived outside awareness, nor any effect of reward magnitude on the amount of applied force (and on all other physiological measures) when subjects were unaware of the rewards. These results call for a deeper inquiry of claims of unconscious reward and motivation processing.

Breaking and Reverse Continuous Flash Suppression represent valuable tools to explore the dynamics of access (bCFS) and disappearance (revCFS) from visual awareness of visual stimuli. In this study, we investigated electrophysiological dynamics of access and disappearance of face stimuli in visual awareness through a time-dependent eXplainable-MultiVariatePatternAnalysis, comparing the EEG activity at each time against a baseline (i.e., the start of the trial) to quantify differences between the baseline and the time-dependent activity. Then, through an explainable AI technique, we defined the relevance of each electrode regarding the baseline-versus-time classification.

In a pilot of 18 subjects, we measured EEG activity during bCFS and revCFS, in which participants provided responses for conscious access and disappearance, respectively. Distinct neural patterns were defined by comparing the dynamics of access and disappearance from awareness within the two tasks. In the first 1000ms, where the face is ramping up from 0 to maximum intensity (suppressed in bCFS, dominant in revCFS), we observed an increased parieto-occipital activity in both bCFS and revCFS, but with greater intensity and earlier in time in bCFS. Comparing the moment of access and disappearance, a sustained parieto-occipital activity, peaking around 400 ms before the report, characterized the access to awareness, whereas conscious disappearance in revCFS was characterized by significant frontal brain activity.

Our results deepen the electrophysiological dynamics of access and disappearance from awareness, showing that conscious access seems mostly modulated by early visual areas. The disappearance from awareness seems rather regulated by frontal areas, with a minor involvement of parietal-occipital regions.

In recent decades, virtual reality (VR) technology has been rapidly developed and allows us to immerse ourselves in virtual environment with our vicarious body (i.e., avatar). The avatar usually has no tactile sensation, which suggests also no pain sensation although any hurting objects contact with the avatar's body. If vicarious pain perception could be induced by seeing the avatar hurt, the intensity of pain and the neural response to the nociceptive stimulation could be modulated by the embodiment of the avatar's body. In the present study, the neural responses were measured by EEG when experimental participants saw that the needle of an injector pricked on the fingers of the avatar's hand with or without simultaneous vibration on the finger. Under four conditions (i.e., spatially congruent visuotactile stimulation, incongruent, visual only, and vibration only), the participants evaluated the embodiment and vicarious pain using questionnaires. The significant correlation between the embodiment and vicarious pain was observed, while N1, as an ERP component to the nociceptive stimulation, was not modulated by these subjective ratings. These results suggest that visually presented nociceptive stimulation without any painful sensations could not evoke a neural response related to nociceptive information processing, whereas some participants felt vicarious pain, strengthened by embodiment of the avatar body.

Recent technological advances increasingly blur the boundaries between real and virtual selves, with profound implications in our progressively hyper-digitalized world. Here, we investigated the neural and behavioral signatures underlying joint improvisation and self-other boundaries in dynamic interactions across real and virtual environments. In Study 1, we present data from 10 dyads performing a 1D finger-movement mirror game while magnetoencephalography (MEG) was simultaneously recorded from both subjects alongside finger kinematics tracked via accelerometers. We compared source-level power and intra-brain connectivity across experimental conditions. Alpha-band power in widespread brain regions was reduced in social (interaction or observed action) compared to individual (isolated) action, with this reduction restricted to occipital areas for interaction vs. observed action. Beta suppression was observed in interaction compared to individual action (observed or in isolation), with left TPJ suppression in observed vs. isolated action. Alpha-band intra-brain connectivity decreased in interaction compared to individual action, involving occipital, temporal, parietal, and frontal regions. This reduction may reflect diminished self-monitoring in joint performance, facilitating interpersonal coupling. In Study 2, we further investigate joint improvisation dynamics in real-life and virtual reality (VR) settings, emphasizing moments of togetherness, where self-other boundaries blur. Pairs of participants engage in mirror game interactions both in person and embodying VR avatars, with electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), and motion capture simultaneously recorded in a hyperscanning setup. Our findings contribute to the understanding of brain oscillations in interpersonal motor interactions and address the smoky boundaries between self and other in real and virtual worlds.

Prior expectations shape how we see the world and monitor our feelings. In particular, it has long been evident that priors and ambiguous sensory input interact to determine the course of perceptual decision-making. However, although numerous theories emphasize an important role for interoceptive inference in shaping our exteroceptive perception, there is as yet no evidence as to how visceral rhythms modulate the interaction between priors and input.

Using a novel perceptual learning task, we analysed how cyclic fluctuations of visceral signals in the cardiac domain influence affective perceptual inferences. 274 participants completed the task, in which they had to learn the probabilistic associations between arbitrary visual cues and happy or angry faces of varying valence intensities while physiological signals (i.e. electrocardiogram) were recorded. This design enabled us to manipulate the sensory uncertainty of stimuli and the expected precision of prior expectations. Having tested whether sensory uncertainty, prior expectation and valence influence perceptual behaviour including reaction time, accuracy and also confidence, we then examined how the interaction between these predictors related to the cardiac cycle.

We found that cardiac dynamics over the entire trial encode sensory uncertainty and valence. Furthermore, we identified effects of these behavioural indices on confidence, reaction time and accuracy.

Overall, these results show that there is both top-down modulation, with visceral signals adapting to the perceived characteristics of the sensory environment, and bottom-up modulation, with the phase of visceral cycles influencing perceptual and metacognitive biases. Perceptual consciousness in the affective domain is modulated by this delicate balance.

Introduction

The bodily self is a minimal form of self relying on bodily experiences such as self-location, body ownership, agency, and first-person perspective. These experiences depend on multisensory integration in a network encompassing the temporo-parietal junction, insula, postcentral gyrus, and premotor cortex. While this network has been studied using fMRI, intracranial electrical brain stimulation (EBS) provides a unique opportunity for functional mapping. This study presents primary research through a large whole-brain functional mapping of the bodily self in epilepsy patients.

Methods

We retrospectively analyzed EBS-induced clinical manifestations in 329 epilepsy patients who underwent stereo-electroencephalography. Depth electrodes were implanted in 254 left and 260 right hemispheres. A total of 11,004 stimulations elicited 2,320 clinical responses. We examined alterations in self-location, body ownership, agency, first-person perspective, and body image, identifying the electrode contacts responsible. Functional connectivity changes associated with bodily self disturbances were also assessed.

Results

Bodily self disturbances (n=78, 3.4% of all evoked responses) were observed in 50 patients, primarily affecting body image, self-location, and agency. Key regions included the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, insula, hippocampus, SMA, parietal operculum, and precuneus, with right hemisphere dominance. Functional connectivity analysis revealed decreased connectivity of the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) and a specific IPL-middle temporal gyrus disconnection.

Conclusion

This study provides causal evidence for a multisensory network underlying the bodily self and suggests that IPL disconnection, a key region from the default mode network, plays a central role in bodily self disturbances. These findings refine theoretical models and have neurosurgical and neuropsychiatric implications.

Experienced meditation practitioners often report altered states of self-consciousness, including non-dual awareness and non-self states. However, few studies provide empirical evidence for these effects, particularly from the neuroscientific theory of the minimal self, or bodily self-consciousness (BSC). To address this, we developed a novel meditation practice integrating traditional meditation with Virtual Reality (VR) techniques that can modulate BSC thanks to bodily awareness manipulation and shifts in the first-person perspective. In two studies, participants without meditation experience practiced meditation in VR in two conditions. In one condition, BSC was altered with focused bodily awareness combined with shifts to a third-person perspective (3PP). In the other condition, the first-person perspective was maintained (1PP). We recorded 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG), assessed selected questionnaires, and measured self-identification sensitivity with the full-body illusion (FBI). In the 3PP condition, participants reported stronger experiences of disembodiment and reduced salience of perceived body boundaries. The FBI results suggested reduced self-identification in the 3PP condition compared to the 1PP, especially during the asynchronous FBI. EEG data revealed more negative amplitudes of heart-beat evoked potentials (HEP) during the 3PP condition, likely reflecting activation of the posterior cingulate cortex associated with decreased BSC levels, alongside reduced alpha-band oscillations, potentially indicating multisensory integration in the temporal-parietal region. Leveraging a new VR-supported meditation platform and methods, these data link the sense of self in traditional meditation practice to the neuroscience of the bodily self, based on subjective, behavioral, and neural measures.

Affective touch is slowly moving, low-force mechanical tactile stimulation which is often perceived as enjoyable and is considered key for emotional social bonding. Previous work illustrated that observing other people being touched activates the same cortical areas involved in direct tactile experiences, i.e. vicarious touch. Depersonalisation (DP) is characterized by distressing feelings of being detached from one’s body and others, often described as being “out of touch” with oneself. We conducted two online experiments looking at the relationship between non-clinical experiences of DP and vicarious affective touch and self touch. We found that unlike people with higher DP experiences, low DP people rate the perceived pleasantness of the imagined social touch as received by the self higher than if received by the other. In Experiment 2, we designed a new affective self-touch intervention to explore the effect of affective self-touch stroking on one’s dorsal forearm on the perceived pleasantness and vividness of tactile experiences. We found that both low and high DP participants, following the affective self-touch intervention, report significantly higher ratings of vividness but not pleasantness of tactile experiences. These findings may have key implications for potential sensory tactile-based interventions for people experiencing distressing feelings of DP

Counterfactual actions are action alternatives that could have been chosen and executed, but were not. We investigated memory for counterfactual actions in two behavioural studies. Participants performed the Tower of London task, which involves choosing and executing actions that move coloured balls between pegs to achieve a goal configuration. Immediately after solving each problem, participants were shown several configurations, including the goal, other configurations they had just produced en route to the goal, plausible ‘counterfactual’ configurations drawn from an alternative path to the goal that they could have chosen (but did not), and completely new configurations unrelated to any plausible path. Participants judged if they had seen the shown configuration while solving the immediately-preceding problem. The findings revealed a memory bias: participants erroneously claimed to have seen/executed counterfactual configurations more often than completely new configurations. That is, they made false positive memory areas for counterfactual actions that they might plausibly have planned or executed, but did not in fact execute. One interesting interpretation of this result argues that planning an action is sufficient to encode it in memory, while executing it is not necessary. Our study cannot differentiate between prospective and retrospective influences of counterfactual actions on memory. An ongoing EEG study in the lab aims to target this difference.

Understanding how the brain generates subjective emotional experiences remains a major challenge. Although fear is often thought to be represented similarly regardless of its source, research suggests that our experience of fear might depend on the type of memory involved. For example, machine learning decoders trained to predict Situational Fear (mostly linked to semantic memory) from brain activity can also predict fear driven by Fear Schemas (mostly linked to episodic memory). However, decoders trained on Fear Schemas do not generalize as well to predict Situational Fear. This discrepancy suggests that fear based on Fear Schemas involves broader and more complex brain representations. To explore these differences, we analyzed three fMRI datasets capturing distinct fear experiences associated with different memory types: frightening situations (semantic memory), schema-based fears of animals (episodic memory), and threat conditioning (procedural memory). By comparing decoder performance across 214 regions defined in the Brainnetome atlas, we identified representations to each type of subjective fear. Our results show that Fear Schemas are predicted more accurately than Situational Fear and Threat Conditioning in the occipital, superior temporal, and prefrontal cortices. These findings offer valuable insights into the brain mechanisms underlying mental health issues such as anxiety disorders, which often involve overwhelming Fear Schemas rather than Situational Fear or Threat Conditioning. By taking memory type into account, our work highlights the nuanced interplay between cognitive processes and emotional experience, paving the way for more targeted interventions in mental health.

Self-monitoring is considered crucial for regulatory behavior, yet its influence on performance in basic cognitive tasks remains unclear. We investigated how the requirement to monitor and report one’s response confidence affects performance across three different cognitive domains: visual perception, episodic memory, and semantic memory. Across five experiments with perceptual decision, word recognition, and general knowledge tasks, participants completed a two-response procedure, where they provided initial and final responses. In experimental conditions participants reported their initial response confidence either simultaneously with the initial response or between the two responses. In control conditions, they performed an unrelated visual task, or observed a mask stimulus or a blank screen with no additional task. We hypothesized that explicit confidence reporting would enhance regulatory processes and improve final performance. Contrary to our expectations, across all three domains, we did not find evidence that confidence reports improve performance. When confidence ratings were retrospective, final response improvement was smaller compared to conditions without additional tasks, and changes of mind tended to be less frequent and less corrective. Confidence ratings provided simultaneously with initial responses generally decreased accuracy. In the general knowledge task, while lower confidence was associated with more frequent revisions, the explicit reporting requirement decreased overall revision rates. In general, similar patterns of results emerged in perceptual and memory tasks. These findings indicate that deliberate monitoring might hinder low-level cognitive performance when temporal resources are limited, because it is resource consuming. This interference appears to be domain-general, occurring across perceptual, semantic, and episodic memory tasks.

Behavioral responses to sensory inputs are highly variable, even upon repeated presentations of an identical stimulus. Traditional behavioral analyses (e.g., Signal Detection Theory) assume that this variability stems from uncorrelated noise whose average magnitude is static over time. However, a recent insight, afforded by generalized linear hidden Markov models (GLM-HMMs), is that humans and rodents alternate between discrete and persistent behavioral states during perceptual decision-making. For example, experimental trials can be clustered in states of engaged, disengaged, and biased decision-making strategies. In mice, the probability of being in an engaged behavioral state exhibits an inverted-U relationship to baseline pupil size (a proxy of tonic arousal), consistent with the Yerkes-Dodson Law. By analyzing behavioral, pupil, and neural data from mice (N=9; audio-visual change detection task) and humans (N=69; auditory detection task), the current study investigated 1) whether this relationship generalizes to human participants and 2) what neural mechanisms it is governed by. Mice and humans alternated between several discrete behavioral states and engaged behavioral state probability exhibited an inverted-U relationship with baseline pupil-linked arousal. In mice, preliminary neural analyses further suggest that for visual change detection, this relationship was mediated by pre-change V1 firing rates of putative GABAergic interneurons but not putative pyramidal neurons. These findings imply a general mechanism by which arousal dynamically modulates the cortical state of a primary sensory region to optimize perceptual decision-making. This study furthermore highlights an important insight for consciousness research: conscious perception is governed by discrete and persistent states of altered sensory processing.

The attentional blink (AB) effect – where detecting a first target (T1) in an RSVP stream impairs the perception of a second target (T2) at a critical temporal lag – has been extensively used to investigate the neural correlates of conscious and unconscious processing. However, the validity of these neural correlates has been questioned when participants have a task at hand on the stimulus of interest, leading to the development of no-report paradigms.

In this study, we designed a two-step no-report AB paradigm. In the first phase, participants performed a discrimination task on T1 while being presented with task-irrelevant unique T2 words, which varied in memorability and appeared at either a short or long lag. To establish a behavioral benchmark for T2 conscious perception, we included mind-wandering probes in 25% of trials. In the second phase, participants were tested for their incidental memory of the words. Using simple models, we can separately estimate memory decay and the probability of conscious perception as a function of lag and word memorability.

Preliminary results showed that, during the testing phase, T2 words appeared more often in response to mind-wandering probes when they were outside of the AB period. Furthermore, estimates of detection probability from the incidental recall phase point to a similar result. These results suggest that the AB does not only affect decision-making, but it also affects the spontaneous conscious access of task-irrelevant stimuli. Future work will incorporate EEG recordings to explore the neural dynamics of T2 conscious perception in this no-report AB design.

The attentional blink (AB) describes the phenomenon that reporting the second of two targets (T1 and T2) is impaired when presented in rapid succession. In decades of EEG research, numerous studies have linked awareness of T2 to enhanced early negativities and late positivities in event-related potentials (ERPs). However, they have systematically confounded awareness with task-related post-perceptual processes such as decision-making, motor preparation, and memory updating. Thus, the present study with 116 participants aimed at disentangling neural correlates of awareness, relevance, and decision-making in the AB. Participants were presented with rapid streams of letter strings (T1) and words (T2 and distractors) and randomly assigned to one of three groups: 1) In the unmarked condition, participants could not distinguish T2 from distractors. 2) In the marked condition, T2 was highlighted as the relevant stimulus. 3) In the decision condition, participants additionally performed a T2 discrimination task. Comparing ERPs in response to seen versus unseen T2 stimuli demonstrated that early negativities are reliably enhanced by awareness across task conditions, whereas late positivities depend on decision-making. These findings challenge the conclusions of numerous electrophysiological studies on awareness and attention and suggest that the processes underlying enhanced late positivities are not necessary for awareness.

A fundamental question in understanding how the human brain conducts predictive processing is how information about prediction errors is encoded across different levels of the cortical hierarchy, and how this is modulated by attention. Do multiple signals across neuroanatomical regions encode the same information (redundancy), or is additional information revealed when considering these signals together (synergy)?

To address this, we present results from 18 human patients who listened to an auditory oddball task, either while paying attention to the auditory tones or while performing a unrelated visual task. During both conditions, stereoelectroencephalography (sEEG) recordings were obtained from cortical and sub-cortical regions.

By computing mutual information (MI), we quantified the relationship between two neural markers of prediction errors (event-related potentials; ERPs, and broadband activity), and the stimulus identity. Our results show that the amount of auditory prediction error information encoded in the thalamic and frontal regions is modulated by attentional demands: when attending to the visual task, less PE-information is encoded in both regions.

We further employed co-information (Co-I), a higher-order information-theoretic measure, to decompose neural activity into synergistic and redundant components. This analysis revealed that prediction error information is encoded highly synergistically both within and between different levels of the cortical hierarchy including the thalamus, and temporal areas. Notably, we found that attentional demands selectively modulate the degree of this synergistic encoding.

Based on previous research, we propose that this synergistic encoding reflects recurrent processing between different neuroanatomical areas, and its modulation the effect attention has on this processing.

Using subjective reports to measure consciously experienced sense of control has been criticized for low reliability, leading to the domination of this field by the use of implicit measures: intentional binding and sensory attenuation. However, using implicit methods is not always feasible. In the current study, we systematically investigated how the choice of response scale affects reliability of participants’ reports of sense of control. We designed a computer task in which in each trial we manipulated the degree of objective control that participants had. Immediately after each trial participants reported their experienced sense of control on a scale. Across five experiments we compared responses on five scales: a linear scale, a percentage scale, 7-point Likert, 4-point Likert and a binary scale. Moreover, in two additional experiments we compared the directionality of the linear scale. We found that the results were remarkably consistent across all except the binary scale: participants demonstrated the tendency to underestimate the level of control, especially for intermediate levels of objective control. This tendency was not affected by the directionality of the response scale. Next, we tested the between-block reliability of responses finding high level of reliability of responses from the first block. We also performed cluster analysis revealing three distinctive clusters. Finally, we propose how our task can be used as a measure of individual differences and we present metrics that can be extracted from participants’ responses. Overall, our results suggest that explicit reports can be characterized by high reliability typically unaffected by the scale type.

Growing research interest has been dedicated to the idea that sleep-like activity in the brain promotes disengagement from the external world leading to inattention. In particular, slow waves in wakefulness resembling those during sleep, but smaller in amplitude and extent have been found to precede attentional lapses in neural recordings via elecroenchephalography (EEG). Our previous study (Andrillon et al., 2021) demonstrated that the locations of slow waves can differentiate between different mental states: frontal slow wave activity is associated with increased likelihood of mind wandering and posterior slow waves with mind blanking. To overcome the subpar spatial resolution of EEG, we conducted a simultaneous EEG/fMRI experiment with 25 participants, who completed the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) for approximately 50 minutes in an MRI scanner. During the task, the participants were prompted to report their mental state at random intervals. Thus, we were able to combine multimodal neuroimaging data with task performance measures and experience sampling. Our findings confirmed that slow wave activity predicted attentional disengagement indicated by performance impairments and subjective reports. Moreover, we have also identified localised associations between slow waves activity and BOLD activity changes in areas in posterior brain regions. These findings provide new evidence for the location-specific effect of sleep-like slow wave activity during attentional lapses in wakefulness.

Introduction

The notion of a contentful mind is challenged by brief moments of no reportable content, termed mind-blanking (MB). MB's neuronal correlates resemble brain markers of sleep, including an fMRI "hyperconnected" pattern of cortex-wide coherence and EEG slow wave-like activity, which to date have been studies in separation. The present study aimed to bridge fMRI functional connectivity (FC) with EEG to a) replicate MB-related brain patterns during task and b) explore the MB-related brain patterns’ electrophysiological basis.

Methods

Thirty-eight participants performed a sustained attention-to-response task (SART) with simultaneous EEG-fMRI recordings and experience sampling of mental states (Blank, On-Task, Off-Task) and alertness (Very Alert, Alert, Sleepy, Very Sleepy). Phase-based coherence estimated fMRI connectivity, and K-means clustering identified brain patterns. For each TR, FC's distance to these patterns was measured to link cognition and alertness to brain patterns. Canonical correlations were used to assess the relationship between FC and slow wave-like activity.

Results

Behaviorally, MB report frequency increased during lower alertness. Neuronally, five brain patterns emerged, characterized by regional anticorrelations and hyperconnectivity. While sleepiness was closest to brain patterns of hyperconnectivity, MB was associated with patterns of anticorrelations. Finally, increases in the amplitude and the slope of the slow wave-like activity correlated with FC proximity to the hyperconnectivity brain pattern.

Conclusions

Our results show that MB and sleepiness have dissociable cortical correlates. With the hyperconnectivity pattern tied to slow wave-like activity, our study advances discussions on how functional neuroimaging shapes ongoing cognition and how slow-wave activity promotes distinct patterns of cortical organization.

We have relatively little understanding of how and why the neural networks in modern AI systems do what they do. One avenue to better understand these systems is to investigate and develop their capacity to introspect and explain their own functioning. Here, we show that contemporary large language models (LLMs) are capable of accurately explaining their own internal processes. To demonstrate this, we train GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini to learn the preferences of hypothetical actors using examples of the actors’ decisions (e.g., “Macbeth is shopping for a condo. If offered the two described below, he would choose Option A”). Each actor's decisions are determined by a computational model that the LLMs are told nothing about (e.g., Macbeth cares enormously about the amount of natural light, but less about the walkability of the neighborhood, and actually prefers smaller condos). We show that, when asked to make decisions on the actors’ behalf, the LLMs not only do so, but can provide accurate, quantitative descriptions of how much they are weighing each of the different attributes. Critically, these reports are genuine introspection: The LLMs are not doing inference based on observing their own responses. (They make them with no memory of their other responses and without any chain-of-thought.) And they are not just reporting “common sense”. (Versions of the LLMs that do not observe the actors will use and report completely different weights for the attributes.) In ongoing work, we are exploring methods to improve the introspective abilities of LLMs.

Our subjective reality corresponds to a continual stream of perceptual updates. Yet, how the brain constructs this stream remains a scientific mystery. Although experience appears to occur in real-time, psychophysical evidence supports a two-stage model of perception: conscious updates, corresponding to simplified post-hoc interpretations, are preceded by long-lasting periods of unconscious processing, which retain high spatiotemporal fidelity to the incoming information. Here, we used magnetoencephalography and multivariate decoding across time and frequency bands to delineate the neural underpinnings of phenomenology (stage 2) versus sensory processing (stage 1). Subjects performed a motion-induced blindness (MIB) task, in which the illusory disappearances and reappearances of a salient target reflect the closure of unconscious windows leading to perceptual updates. Notably, we kept decoders blind to MIB-related decisional and motor processes by training them on brief localizer trials embedding no task.

Our analyses uncovered a dissociation between high-frequency activity patterns (30-60Hz) and the slow cortical potentials (SCP, 0.05-5Hz). Starting ~500ms before behavioral reports, SCP classifiers successfully discerned target reappearance/disappearance whereas those trained on gamma performed at chance. Crucially, gamma classifiers succeeded on phenomenally-matched control trials, confirming sufficient SNR. Further inspection of their estimates revealed that in MIB trials gamma classifiers always assigned high probability to target’s presence regardless of perceptual state, indicating that gamma activity faithfully tracked the physical input. Overall, our results suggest that while SCP supports conscious contents, gamma provides a substrate for unconscious analysis. These findings reveal a frequency-based division of labor, with distinct bands orchestrating the temporal structure of perceptual awareness.

One of the central aims of visual consciousness research is to understand how perception transitions from unconscious to conscious states. Although numerous studies have investigated the thresholds and emergent processes of visual consciousness in adults, relatively little is known about how these processes develop in childhood. Here, we examined the thresholds and emergent processes of visual consciousness in color and category in preschoolers and adults using a backward masking paradigm.

Sixteen 5–6-year-old children and fifteen adults completed two discrimination tasks (color and category discrimination tasks) with varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; 16.7–216.7 ms for children, 16.7–83.4 ms for adults). Objective discrimination accuracy was recorded, and subjective awareness was assessed using a four-scale Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS). We fit the data with a four-parameter nonlinear psychometric function to estimate each participant's threshold (center of the slope) and gradualness (range of the slope).

The results revealed that the thresholds of objective discrimination and subjective awareness were significantly larger in 5–6-year-olds than in adults, without the main effect of task and interaction between age and task. Furthermore, the emergent processes of objective discrimination and subjective awareness were significantly more gradual in 5–6-year-olds than in adults, without the main effect of task and interaction.

These findings indicate that visual consciousness of color and category emerges at larger thresholds and more gradually in 5–6-year-olds, with no differences in the task performance of color and category. Such developmental differences may be linked to the maturation of the fronto-parietal network.

Introduction: Aphantasia, the absence of visual mental images, has recently been recognized as part of a continuum of normal function and can offer insights into mental imagery in general. While many brain regions have been correlated with visual mental imagery in functional imaging studies, lesions that lead to a loss of mental imagery can identify regions that are causal.

Methods: We performed a literature review to identify lesions associated with aphantasia. Lesions were mapped and compared to a large resting-state connectome. Locations sensitive (T>7, >75% overlap) and specific (family-wise error p<0.05) for aphantasia were identified. The lesion locations were then compared to neuropsychiatric syndromes (n=31) previously studied in our laboratory for similarities.

Results: We identified 11 cases of lesion-induced aphantasia with focal injury to multiple brain locations including the frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes and subcortical structures, without significant lesion overlap. In contrast, greater than 90% of lesions causing aphantasia were functionally connected to the fusiform gyrus (L>R). This location was both sensitive and specific (family-wise error p<0.05) for aphantasia. The aphantasia network was most similar to the lesion-induced blindsight network when compared to 31 neuropsychiatric syndromes.

Conclusion: Aphantasia causing lesions connect to a key region along the ventral visual pathway recently termed the fusiform image node adding causal evidence to the hypothesis that this region is necessary for visual mental imagery. Our results demonstrate similarities between the networks involved in aphantasia and blindsight suggesting shared mechanisms possibly related to non-conscious imagistic representations in these two previously disparate syndromes.

The COGITATE Consortium recently led an adversarial collaboration [1] to test the predictions of two prominent consciousness theories: integrated information theory (IIT) and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT). Initial evidence failed to distinguish between these theories’ predictions from inter-areal functional connectivity (FC). Here, we leverage a data-driven approach to identify FC metric(s) that support pre-registered theoretic predictions.

We obtained the same magnetoencephalography (MEG) data [1] collected from N=94 healthy adults (22.7 +/- 3.5 years old) while viewing different visual stimuli. We compared stimulus decoding performance of 245 different FC metrics, computed between brain areas integral to IIT and GNWT. We then developed neuro-dynamical models based on top-performing features, tuned to predictions from either GNWT (central workspace competition) or IIT (sensory region recurrence).

Multiple FC metrics distinguished between stimulus categories in one or more region–region pairs, with strong overall performance from the barycenter [2], which captures the time-resolved ‘center of mass’ of two processes. The barycenter maximum detects periods of tightly-yoked signal increases in both regions, while the mean captures sustained inter-areal synchrony throughout the epoch. We computed these metrics from simulated time series from the two theory-based models, finding that IIT-predicted dynamics better matched those in empirical MEG data throughout stimulus presentation.

We present a systematic, highly comparative approach to uncover previously unexplored FC measures relevant to processing visual stimuli, with the barycenter as a promising candidate metric for quantitatively evaluating theoretic predictions using empirical and simulated data.

[1] COGITATE Consortium, arXiv (2023)

[2] Petitjean, Pattern Recognition (2010)

The more peripheral in the visual field a stimulus is presented, the harder it gets to detect it and to consciously perceive a displayed item. It is unclear whether human concept cells respond to different levels of detectability in a graded or an all-or-nothing manner. In up to now 37 experimental sessions, we recorded 3405 units in the medial temporal lobe from 8 neurosurgical patients implanted with hybrid Behnke-Fried depth electrodes, while displaying stimuli at eccentricities of 5, 10, and 15 degrees of visual angle, and performing simultaneous eye-tracking. Subjects had to fixate centrally and report the concept they perceived in the periphery. The analysis of our preliminary dataset reveals that the firing rates of concept cells are not only higher for detected versus undetected concepts, but that the firing rates in response to detected concepts also decrease with increasing eccentricity. In addition, the response latencies of these neurons are not only shorter for detected versus undetected stimuli, but also show an increase with increasing eccentricity for detected concepts. Furthermore, the concept cells showed higher firing rates in response to undetected preferred versus undetected non-preferred stimuli. These findings suggest that both firing rates and neuronal response latencies exhibit a graded relationship with the detectability of preferred concepts in the peripheral field of view, providing insight into how conscious perception emerges in the brain during peripheral vision.

Psychology of human learning distinguishes implicit learning, resulting in nonconscious knowledge, and explicit learning, resulting in conscious knowledge. Following Reber’s seminal work, a whole field has focused on sequence and grammar learning. Although behavioral sequences are widespread in animals, few studies have examined the implicit or explicit character of sequence learning . We address this gap by adapting standard paradigms from the human literature to other species. This experiment tested brown-tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp., N=7) in a sequence completion task. The monkeys first learned to follow a target moving on a touchscreen from left to right. The delay between targets' appearance was progressively increased, eliciting anticipatory responses. Correct anticipatory responses triggered the target's display and food reward delivery. With this training, three capuchins performed the sequence completion task with the left-right rule, and one generalized it to an up-down rule. These results show that a sequence completion task can be learned without verbal instructions, opening new perspectives to the study of implicit/explicit learning in non-verbal or pre-verbal participants. We discuss a range of follow-up experimental designs to assess distinctive properties of conscious knowledge within this task.

A key debate in consciousness and affective sciences concerns whether emotions are necessarily conscious, as argued by higher-order (HO) theories (1). In this paper, I highlight how the kind of phenomenon known as hedonic reversal could inform this debate. Hedonic reversals refer to taking pleasure from experiences that are usually aversive, such as the fear from watching horror movies or the pain from consuming chili peppers. A widely accepted account (2) suggests that it is enabled by a “mind over body” process of enjoying bodily arousal elicited by defensive reactions while one knows there is no actual danger. I point out that this explanation supports HO theories, in the sense that an unconscious, conceptual state is required for engendering defensive reactions but is yet to constitute valence. In particular, hedonic reversal redeems HO theories from defective examples used in the literature (3) by showcasing cases where valence necessarily depends on a third-order state evaluating contextual information using self-schema. This is because valenced processes occurring prior to self-referential appraisal would contradict with danger perception and thereby blocking the interoceptive aspect of the experience. I further discuss how this interpretation is supported by non-fixed views of valence (4) as well as agentive accounts of fear (5). Together, I show that hedonic reversal offers a powerful case against unconscious valence (and thus emotion).

References:

1. LeDoux & Brown (2017). PNAS.

2. Rozin (1999). Well-being, pp. 109-133.

3. Ludwig (2025). Conscious. Cogn.

4. Prinz (2010). Emot. Rev.

5. de Vignemont (2024). Mind Lang.

Counterfactual actions are alternatives that could have been chosen and executed but were not. Investigating their neural bases is challenging due to the difficulty of measuring events that do not occur. To address this, we conducted a meta-analysis of 35 studies examining counterfactuality, aiming to disentangle overlapping and distinct neural mechanisms underlying counterfactual perception and action.

Building on these insights, we developed a novel experimental task. Previous research in our lab revealed a memory bias: participants performing the Tower of London task erroneously claimed to have seen or executed plausible counterfactual configurations more often than entirely new ones. This suggests that planning an action is sufficient to encode it in memory, while execution is not necessary. However, that study could not distinguish between the prospective (planning-related) and retrospective (plausibility-based) contributions of counterfactual actions to these false memories.

To clarify these influences, our current study employs a novel maze task designed to separate prospective and retrospective contributions to counterfactual memory biases. By comparing behavioural responses, we shed light on the cognitive mechanisms driving false memories for actions that were planned but not executed.

This approach provides a novel framework for understanding the neural and cognitive bases of counterfactuality, with implications for decision-making, memory, and goal-directed behavior.

This OSF preregistered study examines how the brain represents the extrinsic and intrinsic value of emotional states and how this influences emotion regulation. Thirty-two participants viewed emotionally evocative video clips while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Using a within-subjects design, participants were instructed to either allow their emotional response to unfold naturally ("Allow") or to suppress their response ("Suppress"). In each trial, participants could earn either £10 ("High Extrinsic Value") or £1 ("Low Extrinsic Value") for successfully following the instructions. Outside of the scanner, participants rated how pleasant/unpleasant, arousing and effortful it was to watch the same videos when suppressing and allowing their emotional response. We calculated the influence of these ratings on participants decisions to suppress or allow their emotional responses to video stimuli in a separate task, and used these parameters to predict the intrinsic value of the instructed emotional states for each trial of the imaging task.

We present preliminary findings on how the extrinsic and intrinsic value of emotion states influences activity in known value-sensitive regions (ventral striatum, ventral medial prefrontal cortex & orbitofrontal cortex), and how this modulates functional connectivity between regions associated with engaging in emotion regulation (dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) and those associated with generating emotional responses (insula, amygdala). By linking emotion regulation to value representation, this research offers novel insights into the neural underpinnings of the evaluation of emotional states and affective decision-making.

Peace of mind, as an internal state of peacefulness and harmony, serves as an index of affective well-being. Recent evidence suggests that peace of mind contributes to subjective well-being across cultures. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain underexplored, particularly in university student populations.

Self-determination theory posits that human beings must satisfy their basic psychological needs—autonomy, relatedness, and competence—to function optimally. Research indicates that satisfying these needs enhances positive and reduces negative affect. However, limited studies have examined whether peace of mind mediates the relationship between psychological needs satisfaction and emotions in university students.

This study investigated the relationships among peace of mind, psychological needs satisfaction, and students’ positive and negative emotions. Data were collected from 350 university students at the University of Crete using the Peace of Mind Scale, the Positive and Negative Affect Scale, and the Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction Scale. Correlation analyses examined associations, while path analysis tested the mediating role of peace of mind in the relationship between psychological needs satisfaction and emotions.

Findings showed a positive association between peace of mind and positive emotions, with competence and autonomy also correlating positively with positive emotions. Conversely, peace of mind negatively correlated with negative emotions. Path analysis confirmed that peace of mind mediated the effects of psychological needs satisfaction on emotions.

Findings highlight the importance of fostering peace of mind to enhance students’ emotional well-being. Universities should implement interventions promoting peace of mind, and future research should explore its role as a protective factor against academic stress.

Emotion recognition plays a vital role in developmental processes, influencing behavior, social interactions, and learning across diverse settings and age groups. Despite its importance, few studies have focused on developing picture databases suitable for investigating emotion recognition across a wide age range, including children as young as five years old. This study addresses this gap by creating a database of emotional pictures tailored for such research. To ensure the appropriateness of the pictures for younger audiences, experts first screened potential pictures. Subsequently, we established normative data by presenting pictures to a large group of adults, who rated each picture on emotional category, confidence, and intensity. The result is a validated set of 566 emotional pictures, providing a unique resource for studying emotion recognition and processing across ages. To evaluate the reliability of this database, we conducted a series of tests. In one analysis, the pictures were divided into 14 subsets. Then we calculated measures of dominance for the participants, for each subset. Correlations between subsets were exceptionally high (r > .9), demonstrating robust consistency in categorization and scoring across the database. This study not only provides a valuable tool for cross-age emotion research but also establishes a reliable methodological framework. These findings invite researchers to explore emotion using a resource that bridges developmental and experimental boundaries.

Theory suggests loneliness is dynamic, manifesting as a stable trait, but also fluctuating over time in everyday life. These trait and state forms of loneliness are argued to have different consequences: trait loneliness is associated with social withdrawal, while state loneliness is associated with social affiliation. Despite its centrality to theory, the time-course of loneliness in daily life is underexplored. We investigated trait and state loneliness and tested their association with a well-established mechanism of social connection: interpersonal emotion regulation. Accordingly, we aim to understand how different forms of loneliness affect seeking and offering support in social interactions.

We conducted an experience sampling study where participants (N=239) completed a baseline survey—assessing trait loneliness—and seven daily surveys over seven days—assessing state loneliness. In daily surveys, participants also reported whether, to what degree, and how (i.e., through which strategies) they tried to change others’ emotions or their own emotions by turning to others.

State loneliness was associated with greater effort invested towards interpersonal emotion regulation. Trait and state loneliness were linked to invalidating other’s feelings or feeling invalidated by others. Moreover, state loneliness was associated with offering less cognitive support to others and receiving cognitive support from others.

Our findings are in line with the social seeking motivation account of state loneliness. Nevertheless, the picture appears more complex than anticipated, in that loneliness predicted engagement in both adaptative and maladaptive social strategies. The experience of loneliness is associated with detrimental social experiences at both trait and state levels.

People often engage in episodic counterfactual thinking, or mentally imagining alternative ways in which past events might have unfolded. For instance, after failing an exam, I might think about how things could have been different if I had studied more. One feature by which these simulations can vary is their plausibility: while some simulations closely mirror the past, others may deviate significantly from what I know could have happened. Extant research has shown that plausibility judgments influences mood, prosocial behavior, and false memories. However, knowledge about the factors that influence this phenomenological feature remains limited. To address this question, we tested three models for what might shape the plausibility of episodic counterfactuals: (1) Whether plausibility is an epiphenomenal feature of how difficult a simulation is to generate; (2) Whether plausibility is derived from the vividness of the simulation or (3) A sampling mechanism that generates more plausible alternatives for the past. Across two experiments, we demonstrated that: (1) Plausibility appears to be an independent property from vividness and difficulty; and (2) When people generate episodic counterfactual thoughts, they tend to produce the most vivid and plausible mental simulations first. Importantly, changes in plausibility and vividness were not accompanied by concurrent changes in difficulty, indicating that this sampling process is not a byproduct of a heuristic that bases metacognitive appraisals on the ease of simulation. Our results support a sampling process that prioritizes the generation of more plausible and vivid counterfactual alternatives.

An “Aha! moment” corresponds to the moment the solution to a problem suddenly pops into consciousness. The phenomenological experience of the “Aha! moment” is characterized by a feeling of suddenness and pleasure and by an increased confidence in the solution. These “Aha!”, also called insights, are defined as the result of restructuration – a representational change of information. With a new paradigm, we asked participants to find 5-letter solution words in six guesses. After each guess, participants were asked to rate their feeling of insight before receiving feedback on which letters of their guess were in the solution word. This feedback provided them with the necessary information to find the solution. To illustrate, the feedback could indicate that the solution contains the letters “I”, “T” and “H” with the position of two letters: _ I _ T_. For some solutions, a representational change of the given feedback was needed to find the word (e.g. separating “T” and “H” in “HINTS”). For other words, there was no need to alter the information representation (e.g. “BIRTH”). We expected the words that needed restructuration to result in more “Aha! moments” but, surprisingly, preliminary data showed the opposite. Participants had fewer “Aha! moments” in the condition for which a change of representation was needed compared to the condition where it was not needed. In contrast to what the definition of an insight suggests, our results indicate that restructuration may not be a prerequisite for the “Aha!” phenomenological experience.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy is a crucial competency in contemporary education, integrating affective, behavioral, cognitive, and ethical dimensions. Understanding AI goes beyond technical proficiency, encompassing motivation, ethical awareness, and responsible use. The present study aims to examine the psychometric properties of the Greek adaptation of the AI Literacy Questionnaire (AILQ), developed by Ng et al. (2024), which assesses AI literacy through a structured framework known as the Affective, Behavioral, Cognitive, and Ethical (ABCE) approach.

The AILQ serves multiple purposes: (1) empowering students by enhancing their AI-related self-efficacy and knowledge, (2) providing educators with a reliable instrument to assess AI literacy levels, and (3) enabling researchers to investigate AI literacy development in diverse educational settings. The adaptation of the questionnaire follows rigorous psychometric validation procedures to ensure conceptual validity and measurement reliability.

The study is conducted with a sample of university students from higher education institutions. Data collection takes place through an online survey using Google Forms, ensuring voluntary and anonymous participation. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) will be employed to examine the underlying structure and verify construct validity. Reliability analysis will be conducted to determine the internal consistency of the scale.

Findings are expected to contribute to the validation of the Greek AILQ as a reliable tool for assessing AI literacy. Results will offer valuable insights for educational policy, curriculum development, and AI pedagogy. This research highlights the importance of a holistic AI literacy framework that fosters both technical competence and ethical responsibility in AI use.

External memory, historically conceptualized within the extended mind framework (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), has long been controversial among theorists. Early critiques highlighted their seemingly passive character. Theorists like Michaelian (2012) identified a disconnect between the static nature of external memory and the constructive processes of internal memory. These criticisms led theorists to retreat toward viewing such systems as pragmatic cognitive scaffolds (Heersmink, 2020) rather than genuine memory extensions. However, we propose a fundamental reconceptualization of external memory, shifting focus from system functionality to content dynamics. Drawing on Chalmers's (2025) notion of propositional interpretability, we demonstrate how AI-driven external memory systems now generate personalized propositional attitudes from user data through three key mechanisms: dynamic retrieval-based contextualization, adaptive content reconstruction, and preference-integrated updating. These systems transcend traditional paradigms of passive storage and retrieval, exhibiting properties previously thought exclusive to internal cognition.

To demonstrate this empirically, we collected an unprecedented multimodal dataset including 5-year continuous (24/7) audio recordings and comprehensive life-logging data. This dataset enables exploration of how AI systems can leverage personal data to reconstruct human mental content, potentially transforming our understanding of external memory in the age of AI.

Key References:

Chalmers, D. J. (2025). Propositional Interpretability in Artificial Intelligence. arXiv:2501.15740

Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. J. (1998). The Extended Mind.

Heersmink, R., & Carter, J. A. (2020). The Philosophy of Memory Technologies: Metaphysics, Knowledge, and Values. Memory Studies, 13(4)

Michaelian, K. (2012). Is External Memory Memory? Biological Memory and Extended Mind. Consciousness and Cognition, 21(3)

In visual working memory (VWM), bottom-up attention prioritizes recalling perceptually similar features, a relational property of stimuli over dissimilar ones. Here, we have conducted a behaviour cum EEG-based VWM experiment on human participants (n = 25) to capture the bias in recalling repeated items vs. not-repeated items by evaluating response time and accuracy in responding to relevant probes. We then investigated their neural correlates using EEG to test our hypotheses that band-specific spectral power differences across two conditions reveal the neural changes that can be associated with underlying causes for task-specific behavioural differences and required attentional facilitation. Our behavioural findings demonstrated faster and more accurate VWM recalling of repeated items than non-repeated items. Early desynchronization of the beta band (13-30 Hz) was found in the C3 electrode at around 200 ms shortly after probe presentation for repeated items which acts as an index for the prioritization of repeated items in VWM and is associated with faster motor preparation for response selection supporting our behavioural results. Comparatively high theta power (4-7Hz) in front-medial sensors for responding to the not-repeated items implies more cognitive control for recalling task-relevant information and potentially suppressing responses to task-irrelevant information. We also observed decreased right posterior parietal alpha power (8-13 Hz) for recalling repeated items over not-repeated items acting as a marker for their attentional facilitation. This provides substantial evidence for the stimulus-driven attentional facilitation and prioritization of probe matching for repeated items over not-repeated items.

Working memory (WM) is traditionally linked to persistent neuronal firing, but recent evidence challenged this, suggesting the presence of silent mechanisms such as short-term synaptic plasticity (STSP). Recent neurocomputational models tested STSP as a possible basis for unconscious WM, but their results depend on architectural decisions. One key factor is network connectivity, particularly weight rectification, which may prune connections and influence how STSP supports memory. Here, we investigate how weight rectification affects STSP-driven WM representations in one of the most cited neurocomputational simulation studies on STSP.

We used a biologically constrained recurrent neural network incorporating STSP (Masse et al., 2019). To examine the impact of network connectivity, we tested different weight rectification strategies and analyzed their effects on WM task performance.

Our results show that input and hidden layer connectivity interact with STSP, affecting performance, while output layer connections play a minor role. Input weights modulate information flow into the memory layer, influencing how STSP encodes memory.

In conclusion, network connectivity significantly impacts the role of STSP in WM, particularly in how input weights filter information before reaching the recurrent memory layer. These findings highlight the need for biologically grounded connectivity choices in neurocomputational models.

Stimuli that consistently predict rewards can capture attention, leading to reward-related attentional biases. These biases are often considered independent of task goals or physical salience, driven by Pavlovian learning processes. Recent evidence suggests that may be a necessary condition for such biases, although the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. One potential mechanism is that explicit awareness biases participants’ selective attention toward the relevant features of the stimuli. This preregistered study tested whether reward-related attentional biases arise primarily as a consequence of selectively attending to reward-predictive features, independent of explicit awareness. Participants performed a visual search task in which one of two potential distractors—one predicting high reward and the other low reward—were presented on some trials. We manipulated selective attention to the reward-predictive feature (distractor color) by assigning participants to one of two groups. In some trials, one group of participants was instructed to report the color of the distractor from the preceding trial, while in the other group, participants were instructed to report an irrelevant distractor feature (its location). As predicted, reward-related attentional biases, as indicated by slower response times for the high-value distractor compared to the low-value distractor, were observed only in the group tasked with reporting the distractor color. Notably, explicit knowledge of the color-reward contingencies did not differ significantly between the two groups. When controlling for individual differences in awareness, both selective attention manipulation and explicit awareness independently influenced reward-related attentional biases.

Understanding the neural mechanisms of conscious experience requires distinguishing brain processes generating awareness from those supporting or following it. A key challenge is identifying electrophysiological markers that track perceptual awareness rather than general cognitive or task-related processes. This study examined visual and auditory awareness, focusing on the effects of reporting and stimulus processing levels on early and late ERP components.

During the EEG recordings, participants completed three experimental blocks: (1) a no-report block with stimuli presented at varying levels of visibility/audibility, (2) a report block with an identification task (with the same stimuli as in block 1), and (3) a block with low-level and high-level objective tasks (designed following the Levels of Processing hypothesis), and subjective Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS).

Analyzes comparing blocks 1 and 2 showed that early VAN, AAN, and later LP components were present in both blocks, but their amplitudes were more pronounced in the report than in the no-report task. This suggests that the necessity to produce a report affects ERP markers of aware perception. The analysis results for block 3 revealed that both early and late components exhibit gradual changes in amplitude—i.e., the higher the PAS rating, the more pronounced the amplitude of a given ERP. However, VAN and AAN components were differentiated by levels of processing to a lesser extent than the late LP markers. This may indicate that early components correlate with non-specific processes related to the early stages of perception, not specific features of conscious content.

Introduction:

Synaesthesia provides a framework to investigate visual perception and memory in the general population. Synaesthesia has been associated with perceptual and memory advantages, but the mechanisms underlying these enhancements remain unclear.

Methods:

We compared the cognitive profiles of synaesthetes, non-synaesthetic relatives of synaesthetes, and non-synaesthetic non-relative controls. Participants completed visual perception (VP), short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory tasks (LTM-immediate and LTM-delayed), involving colour and location manipulations. Mental imagery, cognitive style, and motivation were assessed using questionnaires.

Results:

Data collection is ongoing (Synaesthetes n = 52, Relatives n = 15, Controls n = 42). Preliminary evidence suggests that synaesthetes outperformed controls on most tasks, with no significant differences from relatives. In the VP task, synaesthetes and relatives demonstrated significantly better colour and location perception compared to controls. Synaesthetes more accurately recalled colours than controls in the STM task at a low cognitive load (load = 1). In the LTM tasks, synaesthetes showed significantly better immediate and delayed colour recall, and better location recall in the delayed task. Synaesthesia subtypes were not significantly related to VP or STM performance. Grapheme-colour synaesthetes showed enhanced colour recall in LTM-immediate task, with combined subtypes influencing accuracy more than individual factors. Synaesthetes reported greater self-reported imagery ability than controls.

Conclusion:

This research explores individual cognitive differences, revealing how synaesthetes and their non-synaesthetic relatives share cognitive enhancements, suggesting a potential endophenotype that contributes to understanding perception, memory, and consciousness.

Introduction:

Culture profoundly shapes who we are, how we perceive the world, and how we process information. Yet, the links between cultural context, cognitive processes, and mental health remain elusive. This study examines how cultural differences impact subjective experiences, cognitive and attentional styles, and mental health, focusing on participants from the UK (Western), Chile (Western-Indigenous mix), and Japan (Eastern), selected for their variations according to Hofstede's cultural dimensions.

Method:

A control study (N=99) identifies suitable stimuli for change detection and change blindness tasks. The main study (N=300), with an equal number of participants from Japan, the UK, and Chile, recruits participants via local online platforms. Participants must be native residents. Tasks developed in the Gorilla Experiment Builder assess visual-spatial attention, including change blindness/detection, landscape drawing, cognitive reflection test, and non-verbal reasoning. Additionally, validated surveys measure thinking styles, cognitive-emotional dimensions, and mental health indicators.

Results:

Preliminary findings from the pilot study indicate significant cultural differences in thinking styles and visual-spatial attention. Japanese participants, who emphasize holistic thinking, favor background details. UK participants prefer foreground details, while Chilean participants fall in between in both attention style and thinking. Furthermore, intuitive cognitive styles were linked to higher anxiety levels, while holistic and reflective styles correlated with lower anxiety susceptibility.

Conclusion:

These findings suggest the critical role of culture in shaping cognitive processes, worldviews, and mental well-being. They have implications for developing culturally tailored mental health interventions, inclusive educational tools, and UX design. Additionally, they inform policymakers to respect cultural diversity in their strategies.

Facial emotion perception is influenced by the expresser’s age. While attitudes and beliefs about certain age groups (e.g., the elderly) may contribute to this effect, direct evidence remains limited. This study examined whether age-related stereotypes about emotional experiences (e.g., “older people frequently feel sad”) influence facial emotion perception. Young adults (aged 18–30) completed a facial emotion perception task and an emotional experience rating task. In the perception task, they identified emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness) expressed by younger and older male faces. In the rating task, they viewed neutral facial images of the same individuals and rated how frequently they believed these individuals experienced each emotion. The results revealed that younger faces were more likely to be mistaken for being angry (perception task) and were rated as experiencing anger more frequently (rating task). On the other hand, older faces were more likely to be mistaken for being sad and were rated as experiencing sadness more frequently. This pattern of misattributions and emotional experience stereotypes was largely consistent with previous studies. The results were the same when we conducted the experiment using real human faces and standardized 3D facial images. Thus, while the patterns of errors in facial emotion perception seem to align with age-related stereotypes about emotional experiences, the relationship does not hold at the individual difference level.

Daydreaming is a structured form of mind wandering involving imaginative scenarios, while maladaptive daydreaming (MD) is marked by vivid, prolonged, and compulsive fantasies that disrupt daily life. Music is a particularly powerful trigger for these immersive mental states and uniquely suited to studying daydreaming. Our research investigates the effects of music on daydreaming and MD through survey and experimental approaches. An online survey of 137 participants (83 individuals with MD, 53 controls) revealed that music, compared to other media (e.g., movies, books), is the most effective medium for initiating and sustaining daydreams, especially among MDers. Musical qualities such as positive valence, emotional intensity, and pleasure were pivotal in fostering daydreaming, with MDers reporting longer, more intense music-driven fantasies than controls. Additionally, musical absorption strongly predicted MD severity, suggesting potential avenues for targeted interventions. In a second study, 68 participants (34 MDers, 31 controls) completed the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) under three conditions: silence, positive music, and negative music. While music did not improve task performance, it reduced both internal and external distractions and increased fantasy-related thoughts for MDers compared to controls. These findings highlight music’s unique role in modulating attention and immersive mental states, providing insights into MD mechanisms and suggesting music-based strategies to support mental well-being. By bridging cognition, emotion, and consciousness, this research advances theoretical frameworks of mind wandering and offers practical implications for mental health interventions.

In this talk, I challenge the format approach of drawing the perception-cognition border by arguing that it fails to accommodate to sensory modalities other than vision, particularly olfaction. To distinguish between cognition and perception, one major kind of approach is the format-based approach. According to the format-based approach, the key differences between perception and cognition lies in the format of their representations: perceptual states are iconic, while cognitive states are discursive or symbolic. One notable version of format-based approach is recently proposed by Ned Block. Block argues that perception is fully iconic, nonconceptual and non-propositional, but cognition does not require these features. I argue against the format-based approaches by questioning the role of iconicity as a defining character of perception. Specifically, I focus on Block’s version of iconicity: Analog Tracking and Mirroring (ATM). ATM holds that differences in representations will track and mirror environmental differences in a degree-sensitive way. I argue that this criterion fails to capture the border of cognition and perception when applied to olfaction. To support this claim, I present three key challenges: 1) the irregular and non-linear mapping of odors onto molecular structures, 2) the tight connection between cognition and olfactory perception, and 3) the multisensory nature of olfaction. Based on these challenges, I further argue that olfactory perception is fundamentally non-analogue and non-iconic. Finally, I examine why olfactory and visual perception are radically different in format and why it is dangerous to treat visual perception as a paradigm case for perception.

A central challenge in consciousness research is distinguishing conscious access from the unconscious sensory processing leading up to it. Retro-perception offers a potential solution: a retrospective cue can trigger conscious access to a stimulus long after its disappearance, separating conscious access from initial sensory processing in time. However, previous studies used weak or masked stimuli, which mostly engage feedforward processing, leaving open the possibility that retrospective cues trigger later, but still unconscious, recurrent sensory activity rather than isolated conscious access. To address this, we use an attentional blink paradigm, where stimuli undergo strong, recurrent sensory processing yet often fail to reach consciousness. Participants view a target word (T2, upper or lower case), followed by a retrospective cue (500 ms later): either congruent (spoken version of T2) or incongruent (pseudoword). Participants report T2’s case and visibility. If retro-perception occurs, congruent cues should enhance case discrimination and visibility for blinked words. Preliminary results indicate that retro-cueing can indeed "bring back" blinked words, supporting the idea that conscious access can be cleanly decoupled from sensory processing. Future MEG studies will use this design to isolate the neural mechanisms of retro-perception, clarifying the distinction between sensory processing and conscious access.

As the global population ages, understanding age-related changes to the information processing dynamics that underlie our conscious experiences becomes increasingly urgent. Recent work has pioneered “cognitive matching,” where given patterns of neural activity are compared to a set of cognitively-distinct functional activity maps from the NeuroSynth meta-analysis of ~14,000 fMRI experiments, and has found that the strength of fit diminishes with unconsciousness (Luppi et al., bioRxiv 2023.11.08.566332; bioRxiv 2024.10.19.619194). In order to enhance our understanding of how resting state (RS) activity transitions through meaningful “canonical brain states” as we age, the current analysis aims to apply cognitive matching to RS fMRI data from the Cam-CAN cohort, a rich dataset of ~600 participants spanning ages 18-88 (Shafto et al., 2014, BMC Neurology). We are investigating the degree to which activity patterns match recognizable cognitive states, which NeuroSynth maps display the highest correlation with RS activity, and how both of these factors change over time. Preliminary results suggest that the best fit of RS fMRI data with NeuroSynth brain maps decreases significantly as a function of age (r^2=0.17, p<0.000001). Furthermore, initial analyses suggest that pairing this emerging cognitive matching technique with established proxies of conscious level (Lempel-Ziv complexity) reveals an interaction between age and Lempel-Ziv such that, under age 48, as Lempel-Ziv increases, so does best NeuroSynth fit, but over age 48, increasing Lempel-Ziv corresponds to decreasing NeuroSynth fit (r^2=.11, p<0.001). Through this analysis, we aim to uncover age-related changes in the interplay between cognition and consciousness.

Intentional binding (IB) refers to the phenomenon where the temporal interval between an action and its outcome is subjectively compressed. Typically, when an action (e.g., key press) causes a stimulus (e.g., auditory tone) to occur in an operant condition, the action is perceived as occurring later and the stimulus as occurring earlier compared to when the same events occur independently in a baseline condition. Recent studies have focused on the hypothesis that this phenomenon is driven by the perception of causality between the action and the subsequent stimulus. Based on this perspective, we hypothesized that a similar temporal compression might occur between a preceding stimulus and a response to it. To test this, we conducted two experiments using the Libet clock task, a common procedure for measuring IB, and psychophysical measurements based on the method of constant stimuli. The results demonstrated a robust compression effect, comparable in magnitude to traditional IB. These findings support the explanation that temporal compression is mediated by causal perception and call for a reconsideration of the interpretation of IB as a reflection of the sense of agency.

Conscious perception is intricately intertwined with expectations and attention, making it challenging to separate their neural basis. Most research has explored interactions in the spatial domain, while the relationship between consciousness, attention, and temporal expectations remains less understood. We hypothesize that unlike bottom-up attention, top-down temporal attention operates sluggishly, requiring precise temporal expectations to effectively enhance conscious perception. By employing a modified version of the temporal orienting task, we demonstrate how increasingly precise temporal predictions differentially guide bottom-up and top-down attention, and how temporal attention in turn facilitates conscious perception. We use the corresponding gradual changes in single-trial EEG dynamics to track the neural effects of expectations and attention during and after the foreperiod. Specifically, participants in our experiment identify the orientation of a threshold-contrast Gabor patch and then rate their perceptual awareness of this target using PAS. On every trial, the target is preceded by a neutral cue and a short or a long foreperiod with equal probability. Participants can therefore learn the precise duration of the two foreperiods only gradually. The ERP results identify the N2/P2 and the P3 complex as the neural correlates of consciousness. With increasingly precise predictions, P3 amplitude decreases over trials whereas N2/P2 amplitude increases. These changes correlate with a gradual increase of CNV amplitude in the foreperiod, even though CNV amplitude does not distinguish between seen and unseen trials. These preliminary findings therefore indicate that temporal expectations may not interact with conscious perception directly, but are mediated by selective attention.

Duration is the only feature obviously shared by qualia and their neural substrates. While perceptual experience integrates multisensory information into a unified whole, it remains bounded by a temporal horizon in which inputs and cognitive states are experienced as co-occurring. Here we propose a model for the phenomenological present as a ‘collective memory horizon’. Specifically, we propose that the duration of the present moment in a conscious system is governed by the decay rate of its collective active information storage (AIS) reflecting how long its past continues to disclose information about the present. The temporal horizon of experience thus corresponds to the timescale over which emergent information persists across system-wide interactions, before dissipating. Using tools from statistical mechanics, we define a landscape of energy levels that dictates the likelihood of each possible configuration of a network of binary spiking-neuron-like units, and then optimise the AIS of trajectories over possible landscapes. By tuning self and pairwise interactions across the network, we create conditions under which the group retains past information for longer than any single unit. In other words, while single units are comparatively ‘forgetful’, their interactions shape an energy landscape over which their emergent dynamics exhibit an extended memory window, as shown by a slower AIS decay. As the entire network history goes beyond the histories of individual elements, this suggests an emergent memory effect, thus offering a formal framework to investigate how a unified sense of the present could feasibly arise from the interactions between many comparatively forgetful components.

William James famously described the stream of thought as alternating between moments of stability and transition. Recent empirical studies support this distinction and highlight individual variability in these dynamics. This parallels clinical observations in psychiatric conditions such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), where individuals may experience both sluggish and rushed thought patterns, suggesting altered temporal organization of conscious experience. In this study, we investigate these phenomena by reanalyzing data from four experiments, involving 220 neurotypical participants, who completed a validated clinical attention questionnaire and performed spontaneous word production tasks. Using semantic word embedding models (FastText), we define the semantic speed of thought as the ratio of semantic distance between consecutive words to the time interval between them. This metric integrates the semantic flow of thoughts and their temporal unfolding. We then investigated the relationship between the variability in the speed of thought and scores on the attention questionnaire. We found that participants with higher trait inattention exhibit greater variability in semantic speed, in two guises: First, they show an increased standard deviation of semantic speed. Second, the auto-correlation of semantic speed extends less far back in time, suggesting weaker temporal dependency in their stream of thought or faster fluctuations. Notably, this heightened variability occurs even though trait inattention does not affect mean semantic speed. We discuss these findings in relation to cognitive theories of the stream of consciousness, emphasizing their relevance for understanding individual differences in the temporal organization of conscious thought.

Our conscious experience suggests that our sensory systems continuously track an evolving stream of data in real time, but to some extent this is an illusion. Instead, both our sensory environment and neural processing show considerable rhythmicity that must be coordinated to optimize processing of the world. Research in the auditory domain has shown that neural tracking of environmental rhythms aligns favourable processing timepoints with likely moments of stimulus appearance, to optimise perception. Meanwhile, visual research has largely focused on the influences of neural rhythmic fluctuations that are ‘intrinsic’ and not defined by the external environment. It remains unclear how and whether the brain tracks visual rhythms similarly to audition. To address this, we conducted an MEG study in which participants attended rhythmic visual sequences of rotating Gabor patches and consequently judged the final patch’s orientation or timing. Using a rate-specific phase-locking analysis, we show that the motor system covertly tracks external rhythms, even when they are no longer concurrently present and with task-specific, perceptual effects. We further examine the mechanism of this tracking response and, using time-resolved decoding analyses, show that visual tracking of rhythms is linked to temporally specific mental simulation of the rhythm’s inferred sensory outcomes suggesting a tight coupling between temporal and feature-based anticipation. By showing that flexible tracking of external rhythms occurs similarly in vision as it had previously been shown in audition, our findings highlight the need to, regardless of modality, consider influences of environmental dynamics alongside and in combination with intrinsic constraints.

Self-produced events appear attenuated to us. The classic explanation of sensory

attenuation involves a forward model comparing predicted and perceived sensory

consequences of actions. While initially observed in the tactile domain, multiple

investigations have extended its applicability to the auditory domain. However, recently,

studies have shown that self-generated sounds can also be enhanced. We propose a novel

theory explaining both sensory attenuation and enhancement through adaptation to mean

sound statistics. We tested the perceived loudness of sounds between 40 and 80 dB and

found a regression to the mean sound level. Interestingly, this effect was nearly identical for

self-produced and passively observed but temporally predictable tones, suggesting that

predictability alone is sufficient to induce these perceptual changes. This pattern supports

the idea that perception adapts to the mean sound level rather than differentiating between

self- and externally generated sounds. To experimentally induce a new mean sound level,

we presented sessions where subjects produced in the majority of trials either loud (80 dB)

or quiet (40 dB) tones. When the mean level was loud, rarely presented quiet tones were

massively enhanced. Conversely, when the mean level was quiet, loud tones were

attenuated. Our findings suggest that sensory attenuation and enhancement are not

mechanisms modifying the perception of predicted action consequences but rather reflect

perceptual adjustments to average sound statistics. In conclusion, our brain does not

attempt to cancel out temporally predictable sounds but rather biases them to the average

sound statistics.

Perceptual experiences are not merely a reflection of incoming sensory input but are also shaped by prior experiences and expectations. One important source of prior information which has received comparatively less attention in the consciousness literature is the temporal properties of past events. Here we address this gap, by examining the influence of temporal expectations on perceptual acuity and characterizing the underlying cognitive computations. We designed a difficult change discrimination task, where the timing of change was varied on a trial-by-trial basis, drawing from one of three predefined distributions (uniform, exponential and flipped-exponential) and administered it to N=142 participants online. Our results show that both reaction times and perceptual accuracy fluctuate systematically with environmental temporal structure, suggesting that not only motor output, but also perceptual experience is modulated by temporal priors. Using computational modelling, we identify the logarithmic transformation of the event hazard rate (the probability that an event will occur given that it did not occur yet) as the core operation shaping these effects, in contrast with recent work suggesting that the reciprocal of the probability distribution underlies the influence of temporal priors (Grabenhorst et al., 2019, 2021). Moreover, our modelling reveals a key role for temporal estimation noise in shaping the process, both at the encoding stage, when temporal information is learned and represented and at the decoding stage, when it is used to influence perception. These findings suggest that temporal priors shapes perceptual experience, and shed light on the computational mechanisms behind this effect.

Our perceptual experience is continuously shaped by the integration/segregation of information within temporal windows operating at the sub-second timescale. While some properties of temporal windows like the temporal extent, influence of attention and load have been investigated, the effect of ongoing temporal context--particularly when it could facilitate anticipation--has not been systematically studied. To investigate this, we developed a novel paradigm of temporal integration where two halves of a Kanizsa square are integrated or segregated (seen or not seen as a full square) as a function of their ISI (30,100, 300, 800ms). The two halves were preceded and succeeded by rotating-discs of the same Kanizsa square in a temporally correlated fashion. Three context conditions varied the mean rotation increments (15°, 25°, and 40°), along with a no-context baseline. Participants (N=18) reported whether they perceived a full square in the sequence. We found that, at intermediate and longer ISIs, participants were more likely to perceive the integrated square in the presence of a correlated context compared to no context, suggesting that context-induced anticipation extended the temporal window. The integration was also enhanced in the smallest mean compared to the largest mean condition at the longest ISI, indicating that higher density of correlated context allowed for integration over longer gaps. Our study shows that the speed of temporally correlated context systematically affects integration, highlighting the adaptive nature of how information is organized over time.

Introduction: Existing functional imaging studies assessing neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) only used brief stimulus presentations. However, such an approach does not allow the investigation of whether an NCC candidate corresponds to the onset or the maintenance of a conscious percept.

Methods: In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we used a visual stimulation design, which allows for two different prolonged stimulus presentations in both an aware and an unaware condition independent of the task relevance of stimuli. Participants (N=56) performed a visual distractor task with line stimuli presented in the background, sometimes containing an abstract human face for either 500 or 1000 ms. Depending on prior information, faces were either perceived or remained unaware as assessed by unannounced post-experimental reports.

Results: Results indicate that stimulus awareness and duration increased activation in the extrastriate visual cortex but not in frontal areas.

Conclusion: The findings support the hypothesis that activation in visual areas is tightly coupled to the content and duration of conscious visual perception. Using long stimulus presentations, our study takes a first step towards understanding sustained conscious perception and explaining the continuity of consciousness.

A key aim of consciousness research is to identify factors that impact perceptual processing versus subjective visibility. In vision, spatial attention facilitates both, but appears to affect them differently in magnitude and neural mechanisms. However, the effect of temporal attention was mostly studied for perceptual performance, while the impact on subjective visibility remains unknown.

Here we investigated how temporal attention affects perceptual processing and subjective visibility and underlying neural mechanisms. Participants (N=30) performed a discrimination task in which target onset times were predictable based on either rhythmic or interval-based regularities. We hypothesized that rhythmic attention could have a unique impact as it is putatively mediated by low-level oscillatory entrainment. We found that temporal attention improves perceptual performance as well as subjective perception, as indicated through lower perceptual thresholds compared to an irregular condition. However, this improvement was comparable between rhythm- and interval-based regularities. Surprisingly, EEG data revealed a similar increase in delta phase alignment in both predictive conditions. Anticipatory alpha-band power suppression however, which has also been reported in spatial attention paradigms, was observed in all conditions, including the irregular, suggesting that it represents a separate mechanism of attention.

These results highlight the impact of temporal attention on our perception and thus on the unfolding of our stream of consciousness in time. Further, they suggest that aperiodic interval-based temporal attention is mediated through alignment of non-oscillatory delta-band activity and leads to similar behavioral benefits as periodic temporal attention, in contrast to predictions of prominent entrainment models.

Although still fairly novel, the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness (IIT) has become a relevant alternative in the study of phenomenological experience, especially because of the development of a formal mathematical framework aiming to bridge the gap between philosophical and scientific domains.

In spite of its advances, IIT is still work in progress and, in this sense, a particularly controversial aspect is its treatment of time. As a matter of fact, this sometimes leads to the need of strange or overly complex interpretations in cognitive terms, which naturally casts doubts over the theory as a whole.

To illustrate this problem, we present a set of experiments made using cellular automata (CA) and PyPhi. Our results show how basically any activation pattern of an oscillatory kind yields positive values of integrated information. This applies either to cases where we have considered the whole domain to be the system, or to patterns nested within larger domains.

The fact is, nonetheless, that this is only due to the inherently discrete dynamics underpinning CA systems, rather than some deeper, more interesting phenomena.

Put differently, cellular automata reflect well the world mathematically depicted by the IIT, by enacting the hypothetical isomorphic transformation between physical and subjective time, which is, or so we argue, the main problem of the current framework.

We finally discuss the need for less idealized temporal descriptions for calculating integrated information, as well as some conceptual and mathematical implications stemming from it.

Even in a shared environment, we do not all see the same thing. While the study of individual differences has revolutionized our understanding of personality and various cognitive abilities, consciousness research has focused on universal mechanisms(1). Here, we propose that individual variations in consciousness are not merely noise, but rather reflect stable cognitive traits. Response times in breaking suppression paradigms show remarkable reliability (split-half r>0.9, p<0.01), suggesting a fundamental trait we term nonconscious prioritization speed (NPS, 2). We hypothesized that NPS reflects the rate at which individuals consciously experience their environment, with faster NPS indicating more conscious experiences in a given timeframe. To test this, we developed a self-paced task using Minecraft. Participants (N=49) navigated through virtual urban landscapes while destroying cube-shaped adversaries as a primary task. The environment contained task-irrelevant billboards with embedded target stimuli(3). Then, participants completed a surprise recognition test for these 10 peripheral stimuli. Separately, we measured each participant's NPS through 160 trials of breaking repeated masking suppression(4). Results revealed that faster NPS predicts more accurate incidental memory (r=-0.32, p=0.027), suggesting that individual differences in NPS systematically relate to the breadth of conscious experience. A larger-scale pre-registered replication is underway. These results indicate that NPS represents more than just response speed—this fundamental individual difference in conscious processing has downstream effects on cognitive functions like incidental memory.

1. Gayet, et al., Frontiers in Psychology (2014)

2. Sklar, et al., Cognition (2021).

3. Hirschorn, et al. Behav. Res. Methods (2024).

4. Abir & Hassin, Conscious. Cogn. (2020).

One prominent proposal suggests a separation between the vision for action and vision for perception. It has been proposed that motor responses in priming are based on the rapid feedforward stream of information processing, which extracts only basic, physical properties of the prime stimulus. We tested this hypothesis using a Furrow illusion, in which a veridical, vertical dot movement in the periphery is perceived as tilted when presented against a tilted background grating. In the first experiment, we asked participants to make speeded responses to the target consisting of a dot moving across a tilted path. Preceding the target, prime was presented in the periphery, which consisted of a dot moving vertically, but due to the Furrow illusion was perceived as moving across a tilted path. We asked whether participants’ responses to targets would be affected by the consciously perceived movement along the tilted path or stay unaffected by the veridical, vertical motion of the primes. We observed significant effects of primes on rection times to targets, demonstrating that motor responses were affected by the perceived and not veridical direction of motion. In the second experiment we first estimated the size of the illusion for each participant individually and then used that estimate to eliminate the illusion. With this manipulation, veridical motion was slanted, whereas perceived motion was vertical. Surprisingly, reaction times were not affected by the veridical motion. In summary, our two experiments demonstrate that our visuo-motor responses use consciously perceived information about objects to guide motor responses.

Synesthesia is a cognitive trait where one sensory stimulus simultaneously evokes multiple types of sensations. Although several studies indicate that synesthesia can be acquired through learning, the specific process of transitional acquisition remains unclarified. This study aims to quantify the transitional acquisition of synesthesia by measuring grapheme-color associations observed in synesthetes while learning new graphemes.

We invited four synesthetes to engage in a 10-day online learning program focused on Thai numerals, during which they visited our lab on three occasions to assess their grapheme-color associations. In addition to a standard self-report questionnaire, we utilized eye-tracking methods to measure transient associations. Participants were shown each of the 10 Thai numerals printed in 24 different colors, and we analyzed their gaze patterns on these colored numerals. The findings revealed that, as the learning progressed, the bias in gaze—measured as entropy—increased and gradually converged towards a single color. Furthermore, longitudinal analysis of selected colors indicated that, during the first measurement, grapheme-color associations were predominantly influenced by shape. By the third measurement, however, this determinant had shifted to meaning.

The transition in the factors influencing synesthesia, moving from shape to meaning, can be reframed to highlight how newly learned characters are located in an individual's semantic network. This process transcends synesthesia; when acquiring novel graphemes, placing them within one's semantic framework is essential. Our research has revealed unique and personal experiences associated with graphemes, delving into the qualia connected to these graphemes.

Organisms predict environmental changes moment by moment through adaptive prediction. Changes in the environment that deviate from the context are key features to predict and process efficiently. When deviant sounds interrupt repetitive ones, they reveal neural underpinnings of auditory predictions conceptualised as prediction errors (PE) signals distributed in the brain. In this work, we investigated to what extent event-related potentials (ERP) dynamics encode synergistic and redundant information about PE processing in thalamocortical and corticocortical networks.

We implanted three cats with intracranial electrodes in auditory, prefrontal, motor, parietal-posterior, and visual cortices, and in the geniculate nuclei of the thalamus. Following a Roving auditory oddball paradigm, ERPs were computed for each condition (standard and deviant) during wakefulness, where the Mismatch Negativity was used as neural marker of auditory prediction. Mutual Information (MI) and Co-Information were calculated to reveal the nature of neural dynamics of corticocortical and thalamocortical information.

There was reliable MI between standard and deviant in all the cortices and thalamic locations studied, indicating that neural signals from all locations encode meaningful information about the identity of the oddball stimuli. We further found synergistic information in the ERPs in the thalamus, in the auditory, prefrontal and parietal-posterior cortices, and between auditory cortex and geniculate nucleus, and somatosensory, parietal-posterior and visual cortices.

We conclude that PEs can be encoded in a distributed manner between cortical and subcortical structures. The thalamocortical network, and not only the corticocortical connections, contributes to the integration of information from PEs.

The European Upper Palaeolithic (40,000–11,500 BP) witnessed a surge in artistic expression, notably marked by the emergence of figurative art—a development in symbolic thought which completely changed the nature of mental life. Understanding this cognitive shift should have a fundamental effect on our understanding of the development of human consciousness. To investigate this, we employed eye-tracking methodologies to examine behavioural responses to Palaeolithic imagery, focusing on ‘Venus Figurines’—small 3D female carvings (31,000–23,000 BP) representing the earliest traditions in the depiction of the human form.

Our study explored the influence of participant sex/gender on the perception of these figurines, expecting to find significant differences in line with known perceptual biases toward female bodies. Participants (n = 53, 27 female) viewed 21 Venus Figurines for five-seconds in a free-viewing task. Each stimulus was divided into five regions of interest (Head, Upper Torso, Lower Torso, Upper Legs, Lower Legs). ANOVAs and Bayes factor analyses revealed no significant effect of sex/gender on dwell time (p = .087, BF₀₁ = 172.58) or first fixations (p = .156, BF₀₁ = 5.414) to the ROIs.

These findings suggest that by the Upper Palaeolithic, symbolic cognition had advanced enough for artists to override baseline perceptual tendencies, allowing them to place greater emphasis on symbolic or cultural meanings. This challenges the application of modern intuitive beliefs to prehistoric art and highlights the complexity of early human mental life.

This research project investigates how processing fluency, influenced by affective and perceptual factors, impacts intuitive semantic judgments, thus offering insights into confidence and decision-making mechanisms. Two experiments employed eye-tracking methodology while participants completed the Dyads of Triads task, identifying semantically coherent word triads. Study 1 (n = 39) examined the impact of emotional valence (positive, neutral, negative) on judgment speed, confidence, and accuracy. Study 2 (n = 47) introduced perceptual fluency manipulation through visual contrast alongside emotional valence. Across both studies, participants identified solvable triads above chance, with high fluency conditions enhancing subjective confidence and response speed but not accuracy. Positive affective content led to faster responses and higher confidence ratings, while high visual contrast similarly accelerated judgments and reinforced confidence without improving accuracy. Eye-tracking data revealed reduced fixation durations for solvable triads under high fluency conditions, indicating more efficient processing. Longer inspection times correlated with decreased confidence across affect conditions, suggesting that extended processing signals uncertainty in intuitive judgments. These findings refine our understanding of processing fluency by demonstrating that fluency - whether derived from affective or perceptual cues - modulates subjective experience without affecting objective judgment accuracy. This research provides empirical evidence for the dissociation between confidence and correctness in intuitive decision-making, contributing to metacognitive models and emphasizing the role of eye-tracking in elucidating cognitive mechanisms underlying semantic coherence judgments.

It is commonly agreed that attitudes towards objects, ideas, and people are learned rather than innate. One of the mechanisms of attitude acquisition is evaluative conditioning. Evaluative conditioning (EC) involves pairing a neutral stimulus with an emotionally charged stimulus, leading to a change in the individual's response to the neutral stimulus over time. Cognitive mechanisms of EC include the processes of associative learning, where individuals form connections between stimuli based on experience and emotional responses—additionally, higher-order cognitive processes, such as forming propositions about environmental relations, influence EC. Our research aims to disentangle these processes and track their development. We conducted two experimental studies to examine the developmental trajectory of EC mechanisms. In Experiment 1, we tested N = 47 infants (9-10 months old) using an eye-tracking paradigm to assess visual preferences for conditioned stimuli. In Experiment 2, 74 children aged 3-4 and 6-7 years participated in an evaluative conditioning task measuring changes in preference before and after conditioning. The results indicate that 9-10-month-old infants did not show EC effects, challenging the assumption that associative learning alone drives early attitude formation. Older children exhibited higher preferences for positively conditioned stimuli, which was not the case for 3-4-year-olds. These findings suggest that propositional learning mechanisms, which require higher-order cognitive processing and potentially conscious access, become more dominant with age. Our study contributes to understanding the development of cognitive control in attitude acquisition and its implications for consciousness research.

Synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon in which one sensory stimulus evokes multiple sensations, e.g., seeing colors when looking at graphemes or attributing personality traits to numbers (Ward, 2013; Simner et al., 2007). Although several studies indicate that synesthesia can be acquired through learning, the specific process of transitional acquisition remains unclarified. This study aims to elucidate the evolution of grapheme-color synesthesia during early learning. We recruited children from the general population, regardless of whether they exhibit synesthesia, since our target age group is just beginning their literacy study, making it difficult to predict which children may develop synesthesia in the future.

We asked children to select colors and personality traits that best represented each number from 0 to 9. We assured them there were no right or wrong answers, allowing for responses such as "none" or "don't know." Surprisingly, every child provided meaningful answers, often offering more nuanced descriptions than the options given (e.g., “’7’ and ‘8’ are twin old men, with ‘8’ being mean but kind only to ‘7’”). We continued our longitudinal interviews to assess the temporal consistency of their responses, a factor commonly used as an indicator of synesthesia. Additionally, we conducted qualitative analyses to understand the elements that contribute to the expression of synesthesia in children and how this differs from adult experiences of the phenomenon. Synesthesia relates to individual differences in subjective experiences. Through this research, we aim to uncover aspects of children's previously hidden subjective worlds.

Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is known to be associated with racing thoughts. Christoff et al. (2016) posit that the main determinant of the dynamics of spontaneous thoughts is the presence of constraints on cognition, be it automatic or deliberate. In the present project, we operationalized the unfolding of spontaneous thoughts with a word generation paradigm, building on the idea that word associations reflect cognitive processes involved in thought generation. We contrasted two levels of constraint on word associations to test the differential impact of subclinical ADHD-like symptomatology on the dynamics of the resulting “trains of thoughts”. In the "strong constraint" conditions, each word had to be "close" to the previous one, in terms of semantics or of context of utilization; in the “weak constraint” condition, participants had to say the words that came spontaneously to their mind. In the two conditions, participants generated series of 10-30 words aloud, following a metronome, after reading an initial seed word presented on the screen.

We first validate the notion that the "weak constraint" condition mirrors free thoughts by comparing the word produced in the task with participants’ self-reported real-life thought topics. Then, using reaction times and semantic metrics, we show that the participants who scored higher on an ADHD diagnostic questionnaire produced more dynamic series of words, but only in the "weak constraint" condition - akin to free thoughts. Our results have both methodological and theoretical implications for the emerging field of spontaneous thought research.

Background: Mind-wandering (MW) refers to the spontaneous experience of thoughts unrelated to the task at hand and has been linked to mental health conditions. However, the relationship between mental health traits and the temporal focus of MW remains underexplored. Aim: This study investigated how mental health traits (i.e., depression, anxiety, rumination, and flourishing) are associated with temporal orientation of MW in adults. Method: Sixty-five online participants completed a slowed digit Go/No-Go task across five blocks. After each block, participants recorded their MW thoughts and rated their temporal orientation (past, present, future) on a 1-7 Likert scale (1 = not at all, 7 = completely). Subsequently, validated psychological scales were administered to assess depressive, anxious, ruminative, and flourishing traits. Result: Multilevel modelling revealed distinct patterns of MW temporal focus across mental health traits. Participants with higher anxiety exhibited a significant tendency toward future-oriented thoughts. By contrast, those with higher depressive traits were significantly less likely to engage in future-oriented MW. Additionally, higher brooding rumination traits correlated with increased past-oriented MW, while reflective pondering, another type of rumination, was negatively associated with present-focused thoughts but positively linked to future-oriented MW. Finally, flourishing traits correlated significantly with greater present-focused MW. Implication: These findings highlight how different mental health traits shape the temporal focus on inner experience. They provide potential applications for personalized psychological interventions, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness-based practices.

Mind-wandering, defined as spontaneous shifts in attention away from a primary task toward unrelated thoughts, is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human cognition. It has been associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a condition for which methylphenidate—a drug targeting dopaminergic and noradrenergic systems—is the most widely prescribed treatment. Despite its extensive use, it remains uncertain whether methylphenidate’s therapeutic effects in ADHD are mediated by its modulation of mind-wandering. To address this question, we conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject study examining the impact of methylphenidate on mind-wandering. Participants completed a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) featuring embedded thought probes that prompted self-reports of mind-wandering episodes. Concurrently, we recorded behavioral responses and electroencephalography (EEG) data, with all analyses preregistered and performed under blinded conditions. Our results indicate that reaction times (RTs) become more variable during mind-wandering compared to on-task periods. In addition, electrophysiological analyses revealed significant reductions in P1 and P300 event-related potentials (ERPs) during episodes of mind-wandering, which is consistent with the perceptual decoupling hypothesis. These findings provide an initial yet crucial step toward a deeper understanding of the neural bases of mind-wandering and elucidate how methylphenidate may modulate this phenomenon. Ultimately, this research could potentially contribute to refining pharmacological strategies for treating ADHD by highlighting potential mechanisms underlying the drug’s efficacy.

Our stream of consciousness is in constant flux. Our attention shifts continuously from one topic to another, and research has shown that individuals with a higher level of trait inattention experience more frequent and pronounced shifts. Similarly, the external world is ever-changing. To what extent do external events influence the dynamics of our stream of consciousness, and how does this influence depend on the internal attentional capacity of each individual? We address these questions through a spontaneous word generation task (free verbal fluency), enabling us to track the semantic content of participants' stream of consciousness. We implemented this task in two experiments (N = 60 in each), incorporating external distractors, either non-semantic (brief dots) or semantic (words of concrete objects) flashed on the computer screen. Across both experiments, we found that distracting events influenced the dynamics of the stream of consciousness, but with notable differences depending on their semantic content. Non-semantic distractors created temporary disruptions in the timing of word generation and the associated semantic distances, with stronger effects in participants with higher trait inattention. In contrast, semantic distractors had a more prolonged derailment effect on both the timing and semantic dimensions of the stream of consciousness, irrespective of participants’ trait inattention. We discuss our findings in the context of the emerging study of the stream of consciousness and their implications for research on consciousness in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Mind wandering (MW) is an ubiquitous phenomenon that despite its negative effects on cognitive processes like working memory, sustained attention, or response inhibition, has been suggested to play an important role in creative cognition, namely during the incubation period of a creative problem-solving task. However it remains unclear whether MW during the course of a creative task benefits the real-time expression of creative behaviour. Musical improvisation provides an ecologically useful framework for studying the real-time effects of MW on creativity. Indeed, in a preliminary study, the present authors showed that MW during a jazz improvisation task enhanced the creativity of musical improvisation in expert pianists, compared with states of on-task attention.

Here, we aim to replicate these findings with a bigger sample size and a more nuanced assessment of conscious experience that also captures other off-task thought phenomena like mind blanking and task-related interference.

In a repeated-measures design, 52 jazz musicians with varying expertise completed musical improvisation tasks interleaved with random thought probes. Musical creativity was independently rated by 2 musical judges using the Consensual Assessment Technique.

We expect to replicate previous findings of MW-associated enhancement of musical creativity. We also expect that this effect will be more prevalent in proficient musicians, compared to novices.

Should we obtain our expected results, this investigation will sediment our previous claim that mind wandering during improvisation is associated with a significant increase in musical creativity. It will also provide the first account of the real-time impact of different attentional states on musical performance.

Mind wandering (MW), as an important type of spontaneous thought, is a pervasive conscious mental phenomenon that occupies much of our waking life. In this talk, I will address the question: Why is mind wandering phenomenologically effortless?

The influential cognitive control theories of MW (Shepherd, 2019; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006) claim that MW involves cognitive control. A paradox thus arises: Cognitive control typically incurs mental effort, yet MW is experienced as effortless. I resolve this by proposing a new cognitive control account that integrates two key ideas: (1) MW consists of brief, semantically connected thought segments separated by abrupt topic shifts (the dynamic segmented structure of MW) (Sripada & Taxali, 2020); and (2) the costs incurred by cognitive control engaged in a single task accumulate over time (Kurzban et al., 2013; Shenhav et al., 2013).

Cognitive control incurs intrinsic and opportunity costs. These costs accumulate during prolonged engagement with a single task or topic. However, MW’s rapid transitions between various segments/topics disrupt sustained investment in any single segment/topic, resetting costs before they accumulate to a level that would induce phenomenological effortfulness. According to the proposed view, cognitive control should thus be understood as operating locally within each segment rather than globally across the entire MW episode, enabling fluid exploration of multiple current concerns without the effort tied to prolonged single-goal pursuit.

This account thus explains the phenomenological effortlessness of mind wandering by reconsidering the role of cognitive control in terms of its dynamic structure.

Mind blanking (MB) refers to a mental state in which people experience an empty mind or cannot report their immediate mental experience. So far, MB has been behaviorally quantified using probes, meaning that participants were choosing among variant options about mental states after a specific cue (e.g., after hearing an auditory tone). This methodology further allowed to characterize the MB’s neural correlates in terms of specific time-varying fMRI connectivity patterns (Mortaheb et al, PNAS 2022). What remains unknown is whether self-caught MB shares similar attributes with those MB reports that are probed. Behavioral data were collected from 22 healthy participants (age: 28yo ± 4; females: 45%, n = 10) who were instructed to press a button every time they became aware of experiencing MB during a 8-12 minute 3T fMRI scanning protocol. MB episodes were reported on average 4 times across the acquisition period (min: 0, max: 16), with 8 participants (36%) not reporting any MB instance. Self-caught MB were reported uniformly across acquisition time (χ2 = 78.36, p = .50, φ = .30). Clustering analysis of MB-related fMRI volumes revealed brain patterns resembling those using the probing approach. Together, these results are comparable with what has been shown for MB reports with probing in the absence of a background task (Mortaheb et al, PNAS 2022). Overall, we show that the self-caught methodology allows for a representative quantification of MB which can assist future research protocols.

Our minds often drift away from the task at hand. What happens to perception when the mind wanders? A common answer to this question is that perceptual processing diminishes (e.g. slow responses, more mistakes, weaker memory encoding), as in many cases of inattention. Unlike selective attention, however, the external environment remains relevant during mind wandering, suggesting meaningful levels of processing may be beneficial. Here, we use EEG and a Large Language Model (LLM) to ask what characterizes naturalistic speech processing (N=25) during self-reported mind-wandering periods. Using LLM-derived markers of contextual surprise, we found that the significant responses evoked by contextually unexpected words remain unchanged during mind-wandering, compared to attentive listening. Crucially, attention shifts and various acoustic covariates could not explain this response. Next, we used the LLM embeddings (hidden layer activations) of speech contents to predict EEG responses using cross-validated encoding models. By capturing the hidden representation, this method tracks the degree of encoding of contextual-semantic information beyond mere surprisal. This analysis showed that both mind-wandering and attentive listening are associated with significant encoding of the LLM embeddings, suggesting that EEG responses are influenced by the contextual meaning of speech when participants report mind-wandering. The results demonstrate the power of LLM to provide theoretical insights using naturalistic task designs, proposing that mind-wandering does not merely result in diminished processing and that some levels of semantic and predictive processing are still intact.

Although the consciousness-altering effects of drugs such as anesthetics and psychedelics are well-established, their effects on cortex-wide activity at high spatiotemporal resolution is less understood.

Utilizing wide-field optical imaging, we recorded fluorescent signals reflecting membrane potentials across both cortical hemispheres in mice that genetically encode voltage indicators in upper layer pyramidal neurons. Experiments were conducted under three conditions: resting waking state, anesthetized, and post injection of a hallucinogenic 5-HT2A agonist.

As many hypotheses of consciousness rely on brain-wide coherence dynamics, we investigated the holistic nature of ongoing activity. During the resting waking state we observe a stable fragmented distribution of phases. In contrast, in both conditions of altered consciousness, we revealed cortex-wide patterns of activity which oscillated between strong coherence and decoherence. These findings are consistent with prominent hypotheses, which describe metastability or entropy to play a crucial role in understanding consciousness.

To further analyze the underlying changes in brain states, we calculated neural manifolds from the time-resolved activity dynamics. We found relatively compact manifolds with sharp curvature during the wake state, suggesting attractor dynamics with metastable brain-wide neural activity. In contrast, application of a psychedelic induced long sweeping manifolds suggesting a diverse range neural states with high degrees of freedom, indicating a less constrained state of neuronal processing. Anesthesia, on the other hand, generated constrained manifolds, which could infer a less flexible and stable brain state.

Overall, the observed changes in cortex-wide dynamics during states of altered consciousness point towards neural mechanisms that involve massive changes in brain-wide coherence.

Mind-wandering reflects a complex interplay between focused attention and off-task mental states. Various studies have investigated the psychological and systematic mechanisms underlying these shifts. However, previous models have not yet provided an account for the underlying neural mechanisms for autonomous shifts between the two states.

Recent works investigated mind-wandering mechanisms using the Predictive Variational Recurrent Neural Network (PV-RNN), a hierarchically organized model rooted in the Free Energy Principle (FEP). The PV-RNN’s dynamic behavior is governed by a meta-level parameter, the meta-prior w, which balances the complexity term against the accuracy term in free energy minimization. While these studies provide critical insights into macroscopic neural mechanisms, the transition from FS to MW was generated by manual resetting of the meta-prior from a low to a high setting, leaving the mechanism for autonomous FS-MW shifts unexplored.

Motivated by the above, we propose an online adaptive mechanism for w, wherein w is modulated depending on the reconstruction error accumulated over a past period. A simulation experiment is presented to showcase the proposed framework. In particular, using PV-RNN, we trained the model to predict sensory patterns generated by probabilistic transitions among multiple cyclic patterns. Simulation results demonstrate that autonomous shifts between FS and MW emerged as w switched dynamically: high w enhanced top-down predictions, promoting MW, while low w emphasized bottom-up sensory perception, favoring FS. Finally, we speculate that agents could become consciously aware of MW when the accumulated error exceeds a certain threshold.

Decoding spontaneous thought from brain activity remains a fundamental goal in cognitive neuroscience. Traditional psychometric assessments often oversimplify the complex content of thought, while free speech analysis provides richer insights into cognitive and emotional processes. In this study, we propose an innovative method that employs large language models (LLMs) as automated raters of retrospective verbal reports. Twenty-seven participants engaged in a free-thinking task, closing their eyes for 30 seconds while their EEG activity was recorded. After each trial, participants described their thoughts, which were transcribed and analyzed. Multiple independent LLM agents evaluated these transcriptions along several phenomenological dimensions such as valence, arousal, temporal orientation, and “imaginariness”. We first, benchmarked these results comparing against human raters, obtaining similar agreement coefficients between human raters and LLMs. To decode neural markers of spontaneous cognition, we computed spectral, information theory and connectivity measures from the EEG data and converted the LLM ratings into binary categories. A random forest classifier, trained using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation, produced promising results with AUCs of 0.66 for positive versus negative, 0.75 for neutral versus affective, 0.65 for low versus high arousal, 0.62 for past versus future orientation, 0.73 for present versus non-present, and 0.75 for plausible versus imaginary thought. These findings demonstrate that LLMs can provide objective, scalable assessments of thought phenomenology and bridge neural data with nuanced cognitive evaluations. This approach has significant implications for advancing theoretical models and practical applications in neuroscience, aligning with current trends in brain-computer interfacing and neuropsychiatric assessment.

Introduction: Mind-wandering episodes often occur during everyday activities, such as listening to music. While a few previous studies have highlighted the impact of music-evoked emotions on thought contents (Taruffi et al., 2017), the mechanisms through which mind-wandering originates from music remain poorly understood. This study examines whether there is a temporal alignment between the perceived structural dynamics of the music and mind-wandering reports during music listening.

Methods: Self-caught instances of mind-wandering will be measured while 80 participants listen to one of two 5-minute instrumental music pieces (either in a familiar or unfamiliar genre). Additionally, to identify which structural elements may induce mind-wandering, qualitative data on listeners’ specific thought triggers and their associated mind-wandering episodes will be collected. A separate group of 50 participants (both non-musicians and musicians) will segment the music pieces to indicate perceived event changes in the music structure.

Expected Results: While data collection is currently ongoing and will be completed in early spring, it is expected that perceived event changes in the music structure will negatively predict the occurrence of mind-wandering, with a stronger effect for unfamiliar (versus familiar) music.

Conclusion/Significance: This study has important implications for understanding the complex relationship between environmental changes and the modulation of attention in a naturalistic context, such as music listening.

References

Taruffi, L., Pehrs, C., Skouras, S., & Koelsch, S. (2017). Effects of sad and happy music on mind-wandering and the default mode network. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 14396.

Depression is an invalidating psychiatric disorder characterized by a high risk of recurrence. Mind-wandering (MW) is a pervasive cognitive phenomenon that can become maladaptive in psychiatric conditions such as major depressive disorder. In particular, MW in depression is often characterized by increased rumination and negatively biased thought patterns. However, its underlying neurophysiological correlates remain insufficiently understood. We here aimed to identify the electrophysiological markers of MW in participants with a prior history of depression, hence at risk of depressive recurrence (ARDR) compared to healthy controls. To investigate these mechanisms, we employed electroencephalography (EEG) during a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) with intermittent thought probes to assess MW episodes. Additionally, a social exclusion manipulation using the Cyberball paradigm allowed to examine whether this intervention influenced MW dynamics and its subtending electrophysiological correlates. Event-related potential (ERP) analysis of Go-stimuli during the SART revealed that ‘on-task’ reports elicited significantly higher P300 amplitudes compared to ‘off-task’ episodes, suggesting reduced attentional engagement during MW. Spectral analyses further indicated increased theta power over frontal regions during on-task episodes, while MW episodes were associated with elevated alpha power over posterior electrodes. These findings align with previous research on MW and attentional disengagement. While these results contribute to our understanding of MW-related neurophysiological markers in depression, further research is needed to refine the characterization of MW subtypes and their role in depression symptomatology. Investigating the variability in MW signatures across different stages pre/post depression may provide valuable insights into cognitive vulnerability and potential targets for intervention.

Background:

It is unclear how the progression of Alzheimer’s disease may impact a person’s conscious experience of their environment. It can be very challenging to know what someone with advanced dementia is experiencing, mainly because they cannot report their thoughts. To circumvent this problem, we studied whether electrophysiological and fMRI signatures of perceptual consciousness found in healthy older adults remained present in people with mild-moderate and severe AD.

Methods:

In two ERP and fMRI experiments, we used a no-report masked visual perception paradigm with healthy older adults (n= 27, patients with mild-moderate AD n = 17 and severe AD n = 7). We contrasted cortical responses to pictures presented for 200ms vs 33ms that are characteristically associated with conscious perception. In the ERP study we examined the visual awareness negativity (VAN) and P400 electrophysiological responses, and in the fMRI study we examined activation in visual cortex and fronto-parietal regions.

Results:

In healthy controls we found characteristic cortical responses in both EEG and fMRI modalities, with VAN and P400 markers and widespread occipital, fusiform face area and fronto-parietal activation. In people with mild AD, there was significantly reduced VAN and P400 markers, and reduced fronto-parietal activation. In people with severe AD, who are behaviourally minimally responsive, there was limited evidence for any markers of conscious perception.

Conclusion:

These results demonstrate that the brain mechanisms associated with conscious perception become increasingly impaired with progression of AD, illustrating how AD should be considered a disorder of consciousness.

This study explores the intersection of time perspective (TP) and sleep/rest-activity rhythm (RAR) disruptions within the broader framework of consciousness studies, particularly focusing on individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). Utilizing phenomenological psychopathology, we investigate how temporal disintegration reflects broader disturbances in the conscious experience of SSD patients.

We employed the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI, a 5-dimensions questionnaire, i.e. Past-Positive (PP), Past-Negative (PN), etc.) and actigraphy to assess TP and RAR in a cohort of 230 subjects (87 females; median age:43, IQR:17). The sample included 122 individuals with SSD (54 outpatients, 68 residential patients) and 108 healthy controls.

Our analysis revealed significant correlations indicative of how temporal orientation impacts sleep as well as activity patterns among SSD patients. Key findings include a positive correlation between PP and Activity Onset (Pearson’s rho (ρ):0.32, p:0.02) and a negative correlation between PN and total sleep time (ρ:-0.29, p:0.03) for outpatients, and a negative correlation between PP and the mean level of activity during the 5 least active hours (Spearman’s rho:-0.27, p:0.02) for residential patients. Importantly, we found more pronounced differences in residential settings, suggesting that environmental factors significantly influence the manifestation of TP disruptions.

In this work emerged the critical role of TP in shaping the conscious experience of time and its impact on RAR. This may be crucial for developing targeted interventions considering both psychological and environmental factors affecting SSD individuals. This work highlights the need to integrate consciousness studies into clinical practices, significantly impacting mental health policies and therapies.

Introduction

Human conscious experience spans a diverse range of thoughts extending beyond the immediate present, such as mind-wandering or mental time travel. This study investigates how depression shapes thought patterns in everyday life and how ongoing experience responds to emotional stimuli in daily contexts. Our study builds on the importance of thought content and context for mental health, offering insights into the experience of depression through naturalistic and experimental approaches.

Methods

We used multilevel models to assess how depression relates to ongoing thought in 140 participants. Multidimensional experience sampling captured thought characteristics- such as valence, intrusiveness, distractibility- six times daily for seven days. Experience sampling was also used while participants completed positive and negative mood induction tasks in the lab using emotional stimuli encountered in everyday life.

Results

Individuals with higher depression levels reported more negative, intrusive, and distracting thoughts in everyday life. Contrary to intuitive beliefs, negative stimuli did not worsen maladaptive thought patterns in people with higher depression. Instead, they showed smaller reductions in negative thoughts after negative stimuli and fewer positive thoughts after positive stimuli compared to those with lower depression levels.

Conclusions

Our results suggest that depression anchors individuals in a persistently negative thought state, where negative stimuli have little effect as baseline experience mirrors negative conditions. We interpret this imbalance as a maladaptive “attractor state” that reinforces depressive symptoms and hinders shifts away from negative states. These findings offer insight into mechanisms maintaining depressive symptoms and highlight the influence of affective traits on conscious experience.

There is an increasing interest in neurodiversity which is often centred around a personalised understanding of one’s conscious experience, as well as strategies to better manage mental distress. Despite research into the brain’s functional landscape in conditions like autism (Hong et al., 2019), there remains little understanding of the structural substrate of inter-individual differences. We are investigating structural coordination in the brains of those with two often co-occurring conditions: synaesthesia and autism.

We present an approach to graph the partial correlations between structural properties of the cortex as parcellated by the human connectome project pipeline (Glasser et al., 2016). These structural covariance networks (SCNs) provide insight into group differences in connectivity and developmental processes (Alexander-Bloch et al., 2013; Sebenius et al., 2025) and yet can be derived from tractable T1-weighted images. We use clustering to estimate high dimensional partial correlations, and employ copulae to facilitate statistical comparison with group-aggregated networks.

Comparing surface area data from a recent study of 100 synaesthetes (Racey et al., 2024) and control data, we find increased network clustering and efficiency in synesthete SCNs, in line with results using cortical thickness (Hanggi et al., 2011). There is a lowered tendency, in synaesthetes, for neighbouring regions to covary in their structural similarity, which drives a reduction in small-world propensity (Muldoon et al., 2016). We will further develop our analysis by examining network complexity. This investigation contributes to our understanding of how perturbation of global brain organisation is related to fundamental shifts in the content of conscious experience.

Damage to the primary visual cortex does not entirely abolish visual processing. Some patients with visual cortical lesions exhibit residual visual performance in their blind field despite lacking conscious awareness—a phenomenon known as blindsight. This study investigated four patients with visual cortical lesions performing a spatial attention task while intracranial EEG and peripheral physiological signals were recorded. Patients identified the presence and orientation of gratings with different spatial frequencies in either their intact or blind visual field. Patients with right-hemisphere lesions, including the primary visual cortex, exhibited classic blindsight, performing above chance in orientation judgments, particularly for low-spatial-frequency stimuli. Patients with left-hemisphere lesions showed no signs of blindsight. Given evidence that interoceptive signals influence perception, in addition to neural activity, we examined the link between respiration, cardiac signals, and residual vision, including the heartbeat-evoked response (HER), previously associated with residual consciousness in comatose patients. In blindsight patients, target visibility and accuracy varied with the phase of the cardiac cycle at stimulus onset, showing opposite patterns for stimuli in the sighted and blind visual fields. Additionally, HER and pre- and post-target respiration amplitudes varied with both accuracy and visibility, while high-gamma oscillatory activity in occipito-temporal electrodes correlated with conscious perception. These findings suggest a causal role of the right primary visual cortex in blindsight, highlight the influence of interoceptive signals on conscious perception, and identify HER and high-gamma activity as potential neurophysiological markers of consciousness. This study advances our understanding of the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying conscious experience.

Inherited Retinal Dystrophies (IRDs) are progressive genetic disorders that lead to severe visual impairment due to photoreceptor degeneration. As vision declines, making the interaction with the environment increasingly challenging, adaptive neural mechanisms come into play to compensate for sensory loss. However, the extent to which IRDs reshape visual information processing remains unclear. This study explores neurophysiological adaptation in IRD patients through a multimodal approach, shedding light on the brain’s capacity for reorganization in late blindness.

A group of IRD patients and age- and gender-matched controls were assessed using Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) in response to 12 Hz flickering checkerboards to evaluate residual visual processing. Additionally, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation combined with 64-channel Electroencephalography (TMS-EEG) targeted occipital (O1, O2) and motor (M1) regions to examine cortical excitability. Results revealed for the first time preserved yet topographically altered neurophysiological responses and cortical excitability patterns in IRD patients even as the visual impairment was severe, thus suggesting retained but less spatially organized visual cortical function.

These findings contribute to the understanding of the neural correlates of visual awareness by demonstrating how residual sensory input and neuroplasticity shape cortical function in progressive blindness. They provide valuable insights into mind-brain interactions, reinforcing the need for integrated neuroscientific approaches to vision loss. With implications for vision restoration, this research holds international significance, informing both theoretical models of consciousness and clinical interventions for individuals with degenerative visual impairments.

Face recognition is a fundamental social function impaired in Prosopagnosia (i.e., disrupted conscious face identification despite preserved covert recognition). Interestingly, in patients with cortical blindness (i.e., Blindsight) unconscious emotional face processing still occurs despite the absence of visual awareness. However, it is unknown whether covert recognition in prosopagnosia arises from preserved unconscious face familiarity processing or face awareness is required. We investigated this question in a patient affected by Acquired Prosopagnosia and Cortical Blindness. MRI Lesion Mapping and Disconnectome analysis revealed extensive left-hemisphere lesions affecting occipito-parieto-temporal cortices, damaging white matter tracts crucial for cortical face processing. Using the Redundant Target Effect paradigm (bilateral visual stimulation in the intact and blind visual field of same/different stimuli) with familiar and novel faces, combined with the Eye-tracker, we examined whether the patient had blindsight-like visual skills, and if face familiarity processing was preserved irrespectively of the visual field stimulation (blind/intact). Results revealed that familiar faces presented in the intact field speeded the responses compared to novel faces, i.e., covert face familiarity processing. Crucially, responses to novel faces presented in the intact field were faster when a familiar face was presented in the blind field. This shows that unconscious face familiarity processing is preserved despite cortical blindness and Prosopagnosia, suggesting subcortical contributions in unconscious face perception independently from the patient’ brain damages. We suggest that subcortical nuclei may distinguish familiar from novel faces, assigning emotional significance to familiar faces without cortical inputs, promoting covert face processing in the absence of awareness and in Prosopagnosia.

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a severe psychiatric disorder characterized by maladaptive eating behaviors, including the avoidance of high-calorie foods and adherence to restrictive diets. While cognitive and emotional disturbances in AN are well-documented, the role of altered visual processing in shaping maladaptive food-related behaviors remains underexplored. This study investigates early-stage visual processing of high- and low-calorie food images in 32 AN-restricted female patients, focusing on their access to visual awareness, dominance within awareness, and implicit evaluative responses. We employed three paradigms: breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (bCFS) to examine initial access to visual awareness, Binocular Rivalry (BR) to assess perceptual dominance, and the Automatic Approach-Avoidance Task (FP-AAT) to probe implicit associations. Results revealed that high-calorie food dominated visual perception longer yet were consistently avoided in implicit tasks. Notably, perceptual dominance was positively correlated with body-focused scales e.g., body listening, while high-calorie avoidance was correlated with body dissatisfaction and interoceptive awareness measures. We hypothesize that disorder-relevant stimuli, such as high-calorie food, act as potent arousal triggers that assign excessive visual salience to aversive categories, reinforcing implicit avoidance tendencies. Given the profound preoccupation with food and distorted eating patterns in AN, our findings highlight the critical role of the earliest visual processing (unconscious), in sustaining food avoidance behaviors. This, in turn, indicates that targeting such stages of visual perception could be a transformative approach in AN treatment. Given the high mortality rate and limited treatment options, this research underscores the urgent need to develop interventions addressing preconscious perceptual biases to promote recovery.

Background: Hyposmia is a common non-motor symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD), linked to olfactory loss and impaired higher-order cognitive functioning. While structural and functional changes in PD with hyposmia are well-documented, studying the dynamic nature of brain states and information processing may offer insights into mechanism of olfactory loss in these patients.

Methods: Structural and functional MRI of PD patients 15 with severe hyposmia (PD-SH), 15 with cognitive normal ability (PD-CN) and 15 healthy controls (HC) were selected. We assessed the dynamic brain state, which characterizes brain's spontaneous spatiotemporal network alterations, and synergy and redundancy measure that capture brain’s capacity for higher-order information exchange. Group differences were analyzed using t-tests with FDR correction.

Results: A dynamic brain state (A), characterized by complex long-range global connections, was significantly decreased in PD-SH and PD-CN compared to HC. In contrast, brain state C, featuring modular-local clusters in sensorimotor and frontal areas, had a higher occurrence probability in PD-SH compared to PD-CN. Higher-order information flow (synergy) was significantly reduced in the bilateral superior temporal, parahippocampal, and cerebellar areas in both PD groups compared to HC. PD-SH showed a larger reduction in synergetic information flow in bilateral frontal, insula, and left sensory-motor areas than PD-CN. Brain state C and whole-brain synergy correlated with odor identification abilities, as assessed by the Japanese Odor Stick Identification Test.

Conclusion: PD patients with olfactory loss exhibit greater disruption in spatiotemporal brain connectivity and a reduction in higher-order information exchange, especially within the prefrontal and limbic regions.

Introduction. Individuals suffering from schizophrenia experience an altered perception of the world, distorting reality and shifting conscious experience. The exact neuronal underpinnings for this are only poorly understood. In schizophrenia widespread synaptic dysfunction has been described (Howes&Onwordi, Mol Psychiatry 2023) which is prone to cause dysregulation of excitatory-inhibitory loops. This might be more problematic in epochs of intense (meaningful) vs moderate (noise-level) neuronal firing. Intense neuronal firing might be less efficiently regulated by these loops leading to extreme intrinsic firing events being contagious between brain regions. This kind of dynamics is well captured by the co-kurtosis (CK) measure (Fry-McKibbin&Hsiao, Econometr Rev 2016). We hypothesize that contagion across brain regions is increased in schizophrenia due to altered excitatory-inhibitory neuronal connections.

Methods. We used resting-state fMRI data of the Human Connectome Project for Early Psychosis (HCP-EP) parcellated by ICA. CK and functional connectivity (FC) between all the time courses were compared across groups. CK results were referenced to phase randomized data.

Results. 17% of the connections exhibited significantly increased CK in the patient group as compared to only 10% altered connections found from FC analysis (4% increase, 6% decrease). CK changes were markedly centered on the salience network and correlated with PANSS sub-scores.

Conclusion. The results indicate that events of intense regional neuronal firing are more contagious to other brain regions in schizophrenia than in healthy controls. This contributes to disorganized incoherent thoughts. Increased contagion due to altered excitatory-inhibitory connections might contribute to the distorted conscious experience in schizophrenia.

Background:

People with advanced Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may appear to have reduced or fluctuating consciousness. However it remains unclear whether the capacity for conscious experience reduces with disease progression. The calculation of the perturbational complexity index state-transition (PCIst) from concurrent transcranial magnetic stimulation and encephalography (TMS-EEG) data could provide a no-report marker of consciousness in people with AD.

Methods

In a TMS-EEG study, single-pulse, monophasic TMS (>150 trials) at a stimulation intensity of 120% resting motor threshold, was delivered to the vertex of healthy older adults (n= 29), patients with mild-moderate AD (n = 17) and severe AD (n= 7). EEG was recorded from 63 electrodes, a TMS-evoked potential between 0 and 300ms post-TMS was obtained and the PCIst was computed using publicly available open-source code (Comolatti et al 2019).

Results

There were no significant differences in PCIst values between the groups F (2,51) = 0.213, P = 0.809. The mean (SD) PCIst values for the control participants were 28.5 (11.5); range = 13.4-51.8; for mild-moderate AD participants = 27.1 (11.9); range = 5.4-48.6; and severe AD participants = 30.7 (17.4); range = 14.1 -64.3. There was variability in PCI values between individuals in all groups, with no significant correlation with severity of AD.

Conclusion

PCIst variability is in keeping with previous studies in healthy awake adults and people with locked-in syndrome (Comolatti et al 2019). If capacity for consciousness remains intact even in severe AD, this highlights the importance of understanding how the contents of consciousness may be impacted by advanced dementia to ensure meaningful person-centred care.

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, is increasingly being viewed as a disorder of consciousness (Huntley et al., 2021), as it may drastically alter how stimuli are represented and experienced. To explore how information processing is disrupted with AD and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), we applied an extension of the partial information decomposition method, called integrated information decomposition (Mediano et al., 2021), to examine the presence of different types of qualitative information processing in resting state fMRI. We used a large dataset from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative to construct a hierarchy of brain regions from the most synergistic (working together to encode more information) to the most redundant (encoding duplicate copies of information), across healthy controls, individuals with AD, and individuals with MCI. Strikingly, compared to controls, the MCI and AD groups exhibited a near reversal in this information processing hierarchy, with greatest changes in the visual and somatomotor networks (cognitively normal group against AD: p = 1.23e-13, Cohen’s d = 0.843). This effect was even more pronounced when considering cognitive decline directly by comparing MMSE, a test for basic cognitive ability. Intriguingly, we found that almost all subcortical brain regions showed significant alteration in processing (FDR corrected p = 0.05) in almost all types of information. These results show the promise of information-based diagnostic tools and highlight a hitherto unknown potential cognitive-focused mechanism distinguishing AD from controls. Future work may confirm the relationship between departure from typical information processing markers and altered cognition.

Introduction: We and others have postulated that Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other dementias are disorders of consciousness. The Perturbation Complexity Index - State Transitions (PCI-ST) measures the complexity of the brain’s response to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) using electroencephalography (EEG) and has been shown to be sensitive to levels of consciousness, such as minimally conscious states. We sought to test the hypothesis that PCI-ST would be reduced in AD compared to healthy aging.

Methods: We assessed 28 participants with AD and 28 healthy controls, using TMS-EEG from left M1 and left IPL-angular gyrus, to calculate the PCI-ST. We also measured cognition with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and disease severity with the Clinical Dementia Rating scale – Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB).

Results: We found that cerebral complexity, as measured by the PCI-ST collapsed across both stimulation sites, was lower in the AD group (M = 20.1) compared to controls (M = 28.9). Moreover, higher complexity across both motor cortex (M1) and inferior parietal lobule (IPL) sites was associated with better MoCA and CDR-SB scores. These results suggest that the PCI-ST is a cognitively relevant marker of conscious cognitive and functional capacity.

Conclusion: These findings support the hypothesis that cortical dementias are disorders of consciousness. This research opens the avenue for future studies on the fundamental nature of consciousness and its neuroanatomical correlates, in addition to enhancing our understanding of dementia and possible therapeutic strategies.

Despite extensive research on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), mechanisms underlying inattentional blindness (IB) remain unclear. Here, we leveraged a three-phase no-report paradigm to investigate the electrophysiological NCCs in IB, minimizing motor and decision-making confounds. Participants performed a peripheral attention task while simultaneously being presented centrally with faces, houses, or visual noise. When probed about these stimuli at the end of the block, approximately 45% of participants failed to perceive the stimuli and exhibited IB. In phase 2, they performed the same task, after being informed about the presence of the stimuli. In phase 3, they were instructed to ignore the peripheral task and instead identify the central stimuli in a three-alternative forced-choice task.

Non-parametric cluster analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) contrasting phase 2 with phase 1, controlling for noise trials, identified two neural components: the Visual Awareness Negativity (VAN, 180–220 ms) and a novel signal characterized by bilateral-posterior positive and frontal-central negative differences (250-400 ms). The P3b/P300, a traditional NCC marker, was only present during phase 3 confirming its association with task relevance rather than perceptual awareness. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) assessing temporal generalization of decoders showed stable above-chance decoding of seen vs. unseen trials, during the 250–400 ms post-stimulus window. Time-frequency cluster analysis revealed significant differences in theta, alpha, and beta bands, implicating these rhythms in visual consciousness. The results emphasize the need to consider multiple processing stages for perceptual awareness, with two ERPs, temporal-generalization decoding, and EEG rhythms all linked to visual awareness without task-related confounds.

Brain injuries are known to disrupt brain network activity beyond the damaged area (von Monakow, 1914). A recent hypothesis suggests that this disruption arises from sleep-like slow waves intruding into the awake state, impairing cognition and behavior (Massimini et al., 2024).

Here, we tested whether regional intrusions of slow-waves contribute to visuospatial neglect, a condition in which, following brain injury, patients ignore the contralesional visual space. Six patients with visuospatial neglect were assessed in the subacute phase (T0) and upon discharge from rehabilitation, approximately one month later (T1). During each session, they performed a visual exploration task ("starry night") while EEG and eye-tracking data were recorded. We measured their left-right exploration bias and correlated it with regional EEG slowing, analyzing both within- and between-session relationships.

Preliminary results show that recovery from neglect (reduced exploration bias) between T0 and T1 coincides with decreased slow-wave activity in a widespread area encompassing contralateral frontal and parietal regions. Crucially, within-session analysis reveals that higher delta power correlates with stronger exploration bias, while transient reductions in slow waves align with gaze shifts toward the neglected space.

These findings suggest that post-lesional slow waves dynamically influence spatial awareness, and their reduction may support recovery.

Arousal and attention are key requirements for conscious access. Arousal and conscious perception typically exhibit a quadratic (U-shaped) relationship, with optimal performance during mid-level arousal. While arousal’s role in sustained attention is well studied, its effect on the dynamic orienting of attention remains unclear.

We measured spontaneous arousal fluctuations via pre-stimulus pupil size in 50 participants during an exogenous cueing task. Participants identified the orientation of a target grating preceded by a non-predictive onset cue. Attentional orienting, quantified as the cueing effect (validly vs. invalidly cued targets), was analyzed using linear and quadratic models across five bins of increasing pre-stimulus pupil size (reflecting increasing arousal).

The relationship between pupil-linked arousal and both overall performance as well as the cueing effect was well captured with quadratic (U-shaped) models, and model fits for the quadratic models were better than for linear models. Overall performance peaked at moderate arousal levels. Similarly, cueing effects were smallest at moderate arousal levels and larger at low and high arousal levels. This indicates that at mid-level arousal, attentional settings optimized target perception, effectively filtering out the non-predictive exogenous cues.

These findings provide a first characterization of how arousal modulates transient shifts of attention, advancing our understanding of how arousal and attention interact in enabling conscious access.

Creative thinking has traditionally been defined as thought that is both "useful" and "unique." However, this definition overlooks a crucial component: the cognitive and emotional work of meaning-making that lies at the heart of creative thought. This theoretical paper argues that creative thinking should be reconceptualized as an active process of meaning construction, drawing on evidence from psychology and aesthetics. In my paper I theorize that this meaning-making process involves five key components: openness to experience; curiosity driving novel connections; reduced self-referential thinking (similar to "ego dissolution" in psychedelic research); increased connectedness (heightened feeling of oneness with the world around us like when in an awe-state); and positive affect.

This understanding helps explain why mind-wandering often spurs creative thoughts. Research demonstrates that the inward turn away from immediate perceptual input during mind-wandering enables the mental space for constructing personal narratives and meanings (Smallwood & Schooler, 2015). It is also during this inward turn of attention that we generate creative thoughts as has been empirically validated through studies showing improved performance on divergent thinking tasks (Baird et al., 2012). Drawing from Noë’s sentiment that understanding requires thoughtful engagement (2023), I arguing that there is an active undertaking in order to make sense of stimuli. This undertaking – the “thoughtful seeing” or sensing - is at the center of the meaning making, and thus creative thinking process.This understanding of creative thinking as meaning-making reveals an overlooked dimension in the cognitive literature and offers new directions for creativity research.

We ought to admit, up front, that one of our strongest unspoken motivations for upholding something close to the traditional concept of self is our desire to see the world’s villains “get what they deserve.” This explains the abundance of constructivist views of the self – narrative selves – in contemporary philosophy and cognitive sciences. True, we do not want to live in a world without morality. But why assume that a world bereft of selves is bereft of morality and moral responsibility? It is because of the equation of moral responsibility with our ordinary moral practices of retributive blame and punishment, just deserts, emotions of anger and resentment, guilts and shame, and so on. Motivated by the Buddhist vision of a selfless universe aimed at eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering, I want to argue that the fear of moral nihilism that motivates the constructivist project is misplaced. Furthermore, following the Buddhist, I argue that the posit of narrative self is likely to produce more harm than good. Thus, there is good reason to abandon the constructivist project.

Access of sensory information to consciousness has been linked to the ignition of content-specific representations in association cortices. How does ignition interact with intrinsic cortical state fluctuations to give rise to conscious perception? We addressed this question in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) by combining multi-electrode recordings with a binocular rivalry (BR) paradigm inducing spontaneously driven changes in the content of consciousness, inferred from the reflexive optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) pattern. We find that fluctuations between low-frequency (LF, 1–9 Hz) and beta (∼20–40 Hz) local field potentials (LFPs) reflect competition between spontaneous updates and stability of conscious contents, respectively. Both LF and beta events were locally modulated. The phase of the former locked differentially to the competing populations just before a spontaneous transition while the latter synchronized the neuronal ensemble coding the consciously perceived content. These results suggest that prefrontal state fluctuations gate conscious perception by mediating internal states that facilitate perceptual update and stability.

Introduction

Disorders of Consciousness (DoC) result from severe brain damage leading to impaired or absent consciousness. Diagnosing the depth of consciousness alteration and distinguishing Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome (UWS) from Minimally Conscious State (MCS) require reliable neurophysiological markers. DoC’s brain dynamics are often characterized by cortical slowing, and delta power has been linked to poor consciousness states and outcomes. We hypothesize that these changes reflect the expression of sleep-like slow waves (SW). To test this, we investigated individual slow waves (SW), to assess their variability across DoC states and etiologies.

Methods

We explored SW in a large high-density EEG dataset from putatively awake DoC patients (105 UWS, 79 MCS) undergoing the ‘Local-Global’ ERP paradigm which assesses brain's ability to process auditory patterns at an unconscious (‘local’) and conscious (‘global’) level. We examined the relationship between SW metrics (e.g. amplitude) and patients’ diagnostic, prognosis and functional evaluation.

Results

Our results reveal that DoC patients have more high-amplitude SW than healthy, awake individuals. MCS patients display steeper SW slopes than UWS and SW are wider and more frequent in patients showing a ‘global’ effect associated with conscious processing. SW properties also vary with etiology, with traumatic brain injury patients exhibiting more frequent, higher-amplitude, and steeper SW than those with anoxic injuries.

Conclusion

These findings suggest that SW metrics vary with clinically and neurophysiologically defined consciousness states, offering potential as fine-grained markers to enhance EEG-based DoC diagnosis. SW may also play a protective role in brain injuries and provide insights into DoC etiologies’ pathophysiology.

False awakenings, where participants dream they are in the sleep lab and perceive it as real, offer a unique lens to study consciousness by merging waking and dreaming states. Our study examines lab dreaming, false awakenings, and lucid dreaming, using virtual reality (VR) and sensory stimulation to enhance metacognitive awareness during sleep.

Participants practiced reality checks in a VR version of the sleep lab, designed with dream-like elements, which served as one of three overlapping environments: the virtual lab, the dreamed lab during sleep, and the real, physical lab. This multi-layered approach aimed to improve participants’ ability to identify their state across different realities. In a first condition, after a single 10-minute VR training, participants napped, and lucidity levels were assessed. In a second condition, the same pre-sleep VR training was paired with a vibration stimulus, which was later delivered during REM sleep via a targeted lucidity reactivation (TLR) protocol. VR training resulted in 56% lab dreams and 48% lucid dreams across both conditions, with 66.7% of lucid dreams originating in the dreamed lab. Notably, all false awakenings in the dreamed lab led to lucid dreams. There were no differences between stimulation and no-stimulation conditions.

This study demonstrates the potential of VR and sensory cues to influence conscious awareness in dreams, providing valuable insights into the mechanisms of dream manipulation and the boundaries of human consciousness across different reality levels.

Objective: Lucid dreaming is characterized by awareness of dreaming and enhanced volitional control, suggesting reactivation of executive functions typically inactive during REM sleep. This study investigates directed information flow between frontal and posterior brain regions during sleep, particularly lucid dreaming, using multivariate Granger causality (GC) analysis of EEG signals.

Methods: We analyzed previously collected EEG data from 27 participants with narcolepsy, including 21 frequent lucid dreamers. Participants underwent five 20-minute nap sessions with intermittent auditory lexical decision tasks, responding via facial muscle contractions. Lucid dreams were identified through subjective reports and objective signaling. EEG data were preprocessed, and directed GC measures between frontal and posterior electrodes were computed across frequency bands.

Results: Causal influence from frontal to posterior regions in the delta-theta bands decreased progressively from wakefulness to deeper sleep stages, mirroring changes in consciousness levels. During lucid REM sleep, there was a significant increase in frontal-to-posterior GC in the delta-theta frequencies, reaching levels comparable to N1 sleep. This increase was independent of behavioral responsiveness to the lexical discrimination task.

Conclusions: The findings provide direct evidence of increased directed functional connectivity from frontal to posterior brain regions during lucid dreaming, supporting the reinvolvement of the frontoparietal executive network. The dissociation between this signature of lucidity and task responsiveness indicates distinct neural mechanisms for lucidity and behavioral responses during sleep.

Parallels between dreams and psychedelic experiences, particularly the N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) state, are well-documented, with shared features such as immersive effects of vivid imagery and emotional intensity, disconnection from the environment and neurophysiological markers like reduced alpha power. Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, the stage most associated with dreaming, is a prime candidate for examining these similarities. Despite this, no quantitative studies have systematically compared the neurophysiological signatures of DMT and the different sleep stages. Recent advances in automatic sleep-staging algorithms now enable continuous quantification of sleep dynamics through "hypnodensities," which estimate the probability of each sleep stage within a given time window based on EEG features. Leveraging these tools, we hypothesize that the neural signatures of DMT –from the perspective of a staging algorithm– align most closely with those of REM sleep compared to other sleep stages.

We collected high-density EEG data from 18 participants receiving continuous infusions of DMT (20mg bolus plus a 2.27mg/min infusion) or placebo for 30 minutes. Hypnodensities were inferred from the C3 electrode using YASA algorithm and compared between conditions.

DMT significantly reduced the probability of wake-like activity while enhancing REM-like activity. This REM-like activity diminished rapidly following the cessation of DMT infusion.

We suggest that DMT induces physiological processes akin to those occurring during REM sleep. This suggests an overlap between the mechanisms underlying dreaming and psychedelic states. Comparing to sleep EEG with dream reports will be essential to clarify their shared and distinct features.

We applied Dynamical Independence (DI) to source-reconstructed high-density EEG data to identify macroscopic processes decoupled from mesoscopic neurophysiology across sleep stages. Emergence was quantified by optimising dynamical dependence of macroscopic variables over spatial scales, examining their temporal and spectral organisation.

In the temporal domain, deep sleep (N2 and N3) showed the highest degree of emergence, indicated by strong decoupling of higher- from lower-scale processes, followed by early sleep onset (N1), REM, and then wakefulness. Deep sleep also displayed a diffuse optimisation landscape, reflecting less consistent dynamical structure. In contrast, wake and REM had fewer but more prominent local minima, indicating more constrained higher-order organisation. N1 exhibited moderate emergence, with large basins of attraction and minimal local minima. Structural similarity analyses (Gromov-Wasserstein) revealed N1 to be most distinct from wake and REM, while wake and REM were more similar at higher-order scales.

In the spectral domain, dynamical dependence peaks (lower emergence) in the alpha range for N1 and wake, and in the delta range for deep sleep and REM. Emergent organisation increased with deeper sleep in the delta band but declined in the beta band. Sigma-band activity, associated with sleep spindles, marked the onset of deep sleep and similarly showed reduced multiscale functional organisation.

Overall, deep sleep exhibited greater emergence than wakefulness and other stages associated with vivid experiences, albeit with less organised structure. These findings underscore the band-specific nature of emergent macroscopic organisation and clarify how fluctuations in consciousness may reflect distinct multiscale patterns in time and frequency domains.

After death experiences (ADEs), in which individuals perceive the presence of a deceased loved one, are reported by 30-60% of the global population.  Despite their prevalence, ADEs remain understudied in experimental research. To better understand the mechanisms of ADEs we leveraged methods and procedures that can experimentally induce felt presences, under controlled experimental settings. This mixed-methods study investigates these experiences by: using a robotic system to induce presence hallucinations through sensorimotor stimulation; collecting neuropsychological data; and conducting semi-structured interviews about the ADEs and induced presences (i.e., Blanke et al., 2014; Bernasconi et al., 2021). Critically, our approach enables the integration of subjective experiences with behavioral data.  In a pilot study (N=11), we found that bereaved individuals (diverse in upbringing and beliefs) who interacted with the deceased's physical body were numerically less likely to report ADEs compared to those who did not. Additionally, bereaved participants were numerically more likely to report experimentally induced presence hallucinations using the robotic system (i.e. Blanke et al., 2014), compared to non-bereaved controls. Notably, one participant reported an ADE during the robotic manipulation, suggesting that such specific ADEs can be experimentally induced alongside presence hallucinations that are not identified as deceased. We propose that ADEs can best be understood by examining evolutionary, interpersonal/social, and sensorimotor factors. These findings advance our understanding of consciousness and grief. Further research is ongoing to strengthen these initial findings and explore the neural and psychological dimensions of experimentally-induced ADEs.

Jhana meditation is an advanced absorptive practice in Theravāda Buddhism, characterized by deep concentration, sensory attenuation, and bliss. Unlike other states of consciousness, Jhana exhibits high arousal with minimal mental content. While traditionally cultivated for insight, its neurophysiological mechanisms remain underexplored, with previous research limited to single-case reports and poorly controlled studies.

To address these limitations, we conducted a controlled 32-channel EEG within-subject study with N = 10 expert meditators (7 female, 3 male; mean age = 61.3, SD = 12.1) from the Pa-Auk Sayadaw lineage, a tradition known for its precise approach to Jhana practice. Each participant was recorded across four days during a 10-day silent retreat, practicing both Jhana and mindfulness of breathing (control).

In line with our pre-registered hypothesis, Jhana meditation was associated with significantly higher cortical entropy (Lempel-Ziv complexity: β = 0.085, p < 0.001; sample entropy: β = 0.186, p < 0.001; spectral entropy: β = 0.067, p < 0.001), indicating greater neural complexity and flexibility. Further analyses revealed increased scale-free dynamics and self-organized criticality, including avalanche criticality (χ² test: p = 0.0043), long-range temporal correlations (DFA 30–45 Hz: p = 0.0005), and a steeper aperiodic spectral slope (FOOOF: p = 0.0095). Furthermore, entropy levels correlated positively with self-reported depth of the Jhana state (p=0.0161) and cognitive flexibility as measured by a divergent thinking task (p = 0.0271). These findings suggest that Jhana meditation enhances critical-like and self-organizing dynamics in brain activity, offering new insights into meditation-induced shifts in brain dynamics.

Altered states of consciousness inducing substances like ketamine are known to have long-lasting pro-hedonic effects and modify neuronal information integration. However, the exact relationship between these effects remains elusive. In this placebo-controlled crossover fMRI study (N=32), we investigated whether i) peak hedonic experiences in response to music require increased information integration, as they emerge from dynamic affective and physiological processes, ii) ketamine’s [0.5mg/kg] subacute pro-hedonic effects are driven by its impact on the brain’s information integration during rest, and iii) this modulation of ongoing baseline processes influences the relationship between information integration and subjective experiences during music listening. Using an established measure of neuronal information integration (ΦWMS), we show that stronger hedonic experiences indeed significantly induced local increases in information integration, spatially linked to norepinephrine transporter density. Furthermore, ketamine massively decreased information integration during rest, which in turn affected stimulus perception. More specifically, the same level of neuronal integration for a given stimulus resulted in a substantially heightened subjective phenomenological experience depending on ketamine’s reduction of baseline integration. Thus, we propose that, much like a candle shining brighter in a dark room, ketamine’s drastic reduction in baseline integration (darkening the room) amplifies the link between stimulus-driven integration (candle light) and phenomenological experience, ultimately intensifying the subjective experience (a brighter perceived light). These findings demonstrate that 1) information integration plays a crucial role in the phenomenology of hedonic experiences and 2) ketamine may facilitate its lasting subacute hedonic effects by modulating neuronal information integration in the brain.

Psychedelics dramatically alter our conscious perception, however, the underlying neural mechanisms are unclear. An increasing number of human studies have been studying how psychedelics affect the brain using non-invasive methods, but the effects on single neurons in the primate brain are unknown. Here, we present an investigation into the neural mechanisms of how psychedelics shape perception through ultra-high-throughput recordings of hundreds of single neurons in the visual cortex of a non-human primate.

We performed neural recordings from multiple nodes of the visual hierarchy in face patches in inferotemporal cortex using novel NHP Neuropixels probes under psilocybin and DOI. We paired these recordings with electrical microstimulation of either at a lower-level or higher-level node. Together, these experiments allow us to dissect the effects of psychedelics on bottom-up processing of visual input versus top-down feedback, which is believed to reflect the brain’s internal model and expectations about the world.

Preliminary results suggest that psychedelics increase neural activity, in particular in long waveform, putative pyramidal cells, as well as in layer 1, the pre-dominant input layer of top-down feedback from higher-level cortex. On the other hand, neural response variability is strongly reduced. Connected areas that are strongly coupled in the sober state become decoupled under psychedelics. Effects of feedback, induced by microstimulation, are strongly reduced by psychedelics. Taken together, psychedelics may provide a useful turn knob for altering the balance between feedforward and feedback signaling in the brain, offering a possible explanation for their promising therapeutic effects for a variety of mental disorders.

The visual awareness negativity (VAN) has been proposed as a neuronal correlate of consciousness (NCC). It is typically obtained by comparing trials in which a stimulus was perceived with trials in which it was not. However, if the VAN represents a true NCC, it should be detectable in conditions where participants consciously perceive stimuli despite their physical absence, such as during visual illusions. Our study (N = 60) aimed to test this hypothesis by employing the sound-induced flash illusion (SIFI). In SIFI, a single briefly flashed white disk is paired with two brief sounds, generating the illusion of a second flash. This paradigm allows for investigating event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with visual illusions, as they coincide with a precisely timed auditory stimulus, enabling the inference of the illusory percept's onset. We employed a modified perceptual awareness scale (PAS) to obtain trial-by-trial reports of subjective perception. ERPs were analyzed by comparing trials with and without illusory percepts under the same physical conditions. We observed an enhanced negativity over occipital-parietal electrodes in the typical VAN window (250 to 300 ms). Our findings suggest that not only veridical perceptions enhance negative potentials over posterior areas in this time window but also illusory percepts, fostering the interpretation of the VAN as an NCC. We suggest that to be considered a neuronal correlate of consciousness, a potential candidate must be detectable not only through the traditional hit-versus-miss comparison but also within illusion paradigms such as the one utilized in this study.

We can rapidly learn repeating patterns in our environment. These learned patterns are often used to form expectations about future sensory events. Several influential predictive coding models posit that stimulus-evoked neural responses in the visual system are reduced when an expected stimulus appears (expectation suppression). However, there is currently scant electrophysiological evidence for genuine expectation suppression in the visual system when relevant confounds are taken into account. This empirical evidence is critical for constraining and developing predictive processing models of conscious experience. To test for expectation suppression we performed three predictive cueing experiments (n=48, n=48, n=60) while recording electroencephalography. Participants learned cue-stimulus associations during a training session and were then exposed to the same cue-stimulus pairs in a subsequent experiment. Experiment 1 presented faces, whereas experiments 2 and 3 presented oriented gratings. Participants viewed a cue followed by an expected or unexpected S1 stimulus. They were then required to report whether that stimulus matched a subsequently presented S2 stimulus. In experiment 3, noise was added to the S1 grating stimuli so that participants heavily relied on the predictive cues while performing the task. Across the three experiments we did not find evidence that expectations influenced event-related potentials in the first 300ms after S1 stimulus onset (i.e., during afferent visual responses). Bayes factors generally favoured the null hypothesis during the peristimulus time window. Our findings do not support predictive coding-based accounts that specify reduced prediction error signalling when perceptual expectations are fulfilled.

Recent experiments demonstrated that instrumental conditioning and responding to previously learned stimuli cannot take place in the absence of stimulus awareness (Skora et al., 2023, 2024). These findings prompt a re-evaluation of older empirical work, which reported motivational effects in response to monetary incentives, even for unreportable stimuli (Pessiglione et al., 2007). These effects may have resulted from masking techniques allowing for residual stimulus awareness, potentially distorting the study’s findings.

We revisited the original paradigm with more rigorous methods aimed at controlling for total absence of stimulus awareness, combining minimal exposure durations with subjective trial-by-trial awareness ratings: employing very brief presentation times in the µs-range renders a stimulus invisible to the participant without having to rely on potentially confounding masking techniques (Lanfranco et al., 2024). Meanwhile, awareness ratings allow to strictly divide trials into below- and above detection threshold.

Across presentation times and awareness ratings, we compared behavioural (physical force exerted on a hand-dynamometer) and electrophysiological measures (EEG components previously implicated in reward processing) between high- and low-reward trials using Bayesian analysis methods. We found no evidence of motivational processing in trials where stimulus awareness was absent.

Our findings suggest that monetary rewards can influence behaviour only if the subject is at least partially aware of them, challenging previous claims about unconscious motivation. Our results underscore the critical role of conscious perception in reward processing, highlighting how crucial it is to rigorously ensure the absence of stimulus awareness in experimental paradigms investigating potentially unconscious processes.

Imagine deciding if a mosquito is present before going to sleep—are you sure that nothing is there? In many contexts, we need to be confident in our inferences about the presence or absence of multisensory stimuli. Here we sought to characterize how humans form such confidence judgments. Participants performed a detection task of audiovisual, visual, and auditory stimuli, at unimodal detection thresholds intensities. They indicated whether a stimulus was present or absent (irrespective of modality) before reporting their amodal confidence on a continuous scale. Finally, they provided modality-specific detection judgments and confidence on a two-dimensional, audiovisual, scale. In two pre-registered experiments (N = 47 and N = 52), participants detected audiovisual stimuli better than unimodal ones, and provided confidence ratings that better tracked objective accuracy following audiovisual than unimodal stimuli. Surprisingly, confidence judgments were both higher and more aligned with objective accuracy following absence than presence judgments. To fit these data, we extended a recent ideal-observer model of visual detection to multimodal detection. The model assumes that only evidence for presence is accumulated, while absence is inferred from counterfactual detectability (i.e., “I would have perceived it if it was present”). Our model successfully reproduced amodal and modality-specific detection decisions, and, despite being fitted to decision and decision time data alone, captured population variability in modality-specific confidence ratings. The model however failed to account for amodal confidence. This suggests that sensory evidence from different modalities may be integrated differently when making detection judgments and when monitoring the accuracy of such judgments.

Human decision-making often occurs in noisy environments, yet individuals can still gain metacognitive insight into their performance even when outcomes are difficult to predict. In this study, we investigated computational and physiological indices of learning that contribute to metacognition. Specifically, we tracked pupil responses to stimuli, choices, and outcomes when participants were unaware of the environmental regularities. Additionally, we collected confidence reports.

In Experiment 1, participants (N=39) learned to predict probabilistic outcomes from combinations of four cues. Experiment 2 (N=20) used the same task with confidence reports. Experiment 3 employed a standard reinforcement learning task, where participants (N=53) chose between two stimuli with different reward probabilities and reported their confidence. Across all experiments, computational models quantified prediction errors and stimulus values.

Experiment 1 showed that pupil responses were sensitive to implicit surprise, but this sensitivity diminished once participants became aware of the environmental regularities. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that surprise also influenced confidence reports—specifically, confidence levels were higher following positive prediction errors on the preceding trial.

These findings contribute to ongoing discussions on reinforcement learning and human cognition (Chew et al., 2021). Our data also support the dissociation between metacognition and performance (Shekhar & Rahnev, 2021). It also demonstrates separate mechanisms of conscious and unconscious learning. Taken together, these results provide new insights into the relationship between performance, metacognition, and physiological arousal markers. A critical next step is to examine how these indices relate to the subjective representation of learning variables (e.g., computational phenomenology; Palminteri & Cecchi, 2023).

For predictive processing, perception is tied to the upshot of inference—the posterior, which makes perception internal and indirect. Tobias Schlicht has argued that this is equivalent to a commitment to Kantian transcendental idealism and that this commitment in turn undermines predictive processing’s claims to completeness, realism and naturalism. But, I shall argue, this argument requires an immodest epistemological stance, it over-emphasises the hallucination part of the notion that perception is controlled hallucination and ignores the control part, it relies on unsatisfactory explanatory strategies, and sets aside fairly modest versions of completeness, realism and naturalism. The debate is useful because addressing Schlicht’s argument moves beyond predictive coding, bringing to the fore the self-evidencing aspects of predictive processing.

The integration of continuous self-reports of subjective experience with physiological data is essential for advancing both cognitive and affective science. Here, we present CAMPEONES, a novel public database designed to capture the temporal evolution of emotional experiences in immersive virtual reality (VR) environments.

In this study, participants engaged in controlled VR tasks specifically designed to elicit a range of emotional responses. Emotional states were continuously recorded using a joystick that tracked dynamic rating trajectories, while central and peripheral physiological signals were simultaneously measured. Synchronization protocols ensured high-quality, multimodal data collection, providing a robust framework for subsequent predictive modeling.

Preliminary analyses reveal associations between continuous emotional annotations and their corresponding physiological markers. The VR paradigm successfully elicited realistic emotional responses that correlated with the temporal dynamics of the continuous annotations.

CAMPEONES makes a significant contribution to affective science by integrating subjective emotional experience with objective physiological correlates. This framework not only deepens our understanding of emotional dynamics in naturalistic settings, but also lays the foundation for AI-driven models capable of predicting the continuous experience of affective states.

The rise in performance and availability of large language models (LLMs) has prompted excitement about their potential to support research in psychology (Demszky et al., 2023). However, research on their application and performance as interviewers in cognitive science is limited. In this study, we explore LLMs’ potential to conduct semi-structured interviews as part of experiments in cognitive neuroscience. To approach this objective, we designed an LLM-based conversational agent and conducted a within-subject experiment whereby 28 participants engaged with our agent after taking part in a robotic sensorimotor task designed to induce presence hallucinations (PHs). PHs are the "sensation that somebody is nearby when no one is actually present" (Blanke et al., 2014) and are a frequent symptom of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease but can also be experienced by healthy individuals (Critchley, 1955). Consistent with previous results, ratings collected by our agent showed that the asynchronous condition of the task led to stronger PH sensations (p=0.02), more passivity experiences (p<0.001), and a lower sense of self-touch (p=0.04). Furthermore, sentiment analysis revealed that the polarity of responses in the asynchronous condition was significantly lower, suggesting the use of more negative vocabulary (p=0.01). Finally, we obtained nuanced insights into the phenomenological experience of robot-induced PHs, with participants describing various temporal and emotional qualities of the felt presence. These results shed light on how LLMs can be harnessed to conduct semi-structured interviews in experimental cognitive science and consciousness studies, thus providing a scalable, accessible, and consistent method to acquire rich qualitative data.

The hypothesis that the brain operates near a critical point has been a longstanding topic of debate in neuroscience. Systems poised at criticality exhibit enhanced information processing, long-range spatiotemporal correlations, and scale-free dynamics—properties that may be essential for the emergence of human consciousness. In this study, we quantify these signatures of criticality on fMRI datasets from subjects under different psychedelic drugs, patients with disorders of consciousness, and a healthy control population. We combine information-theoretic metrics quantifying synergy, redundancy and integrated information with statistical physics measures used to study critical phenomena such as divergence of the specific heat, susceptibility, correlation length and avalanche statistics. These complementary metrics of brain dynamics enable us to construct a phase space of human consciousness. Our findings reveal that signatures of critical behaviour display distinct and non-trivial variations with respect to the control group depending on the condition (psychedelic drug or disorder). Given the brain’s intrinsic functional heterogeneity, we discuss how different markers of criticality respond to dynamics in different brain regions and how they might diverge in their sensitivity to altered states of consciousness. This work provides insights into the mechanistic role of criticality in cognition and its disruptions in altered states, advancing our understanding of consciousness through the lens of complex systems and critical phenomena.

Block's distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness concerns the difference between the availability of information for executive functions and the way an experience feels to the subject. Over the past three decades, this distinction has exerted a profound influence on the science of consciousness even though it has originally been introduced as resting on a conceptual rather than an empirical difference (Block 1995). In this paper, I explore the empirical status and significance of Block’s distinction by analysing it using Imre Lakatos’ methodology of scientific research programmes (Lakatos 1979; Negro 2024).

I begin by observing that the access-phenomenal distinction came to be empirically relevant only with the introduction of two further auxiliary assumptions—the dual NCC hypothesis (Block 2005) and the phenomenal overflow hypothesis (Block 2007, 2011)—both of which postulate that the core conceptual distinction maps onto real differences in neural information processing. I then argue that the empirical significance of Block’s distinction rests wholly on these two hypotheses, as they offer the only way to operationalize the conceptual difference that is being postulated. Finally, I proceed to review recent evidence for and against Block’s auxiliary hypotheses, pointing out that both of these hypotheses rest on post hoc reasoning, might not offer the best way of accounting for the available data, and, in some cases, lead to contradictions. The paper concludes with an answer to the question whether Block’s distinction bears the marks of a degenerative research programme and, if so, what are those marks.

Contemporary Western accounts of consciousness often treat the mind and environment as separate processes. In contrast, evidence from non-Western traditions—such as Kabbalah—illustrates more interactive models of mind–environment engagement (Varela et al. 1991; Sendor 1994). The extensive cross-cultural research on consciousness, coupled with the lack of definitive scientific outcomes, underscores the need for a culturally pluralistic approach to its study.

Drawing on principles from biological systems to model continuous feedback between an organism and its environment (Hutchins, 2010), we employ both closed-loop and open-loop paradigms to highlight the differences between Western and non-Western approaches. In other words, continuous feedback mechanisms—akin to those observed in biological and physical systems (Bettinger & Friston, 2023)—can be represented through a coupling scheme that characterizes the dynamics between mind and environment. Notably, the convergence of insights from the natural sciences and traditional consciousness studies reveals a critical epistemological intersection.

Inspired by this transdisciplinary intersection, we propose a theoretical framework termed the Ecological Approach to Consciousness (EAC). This framework addresses the limitations of contemporary paradigms by integrating non-dualistic, multicultural, physical, biological, and ecological perspectives. The EAC posits that the mind and environment engage in mutually constitutive relationships, forming an interdependent whole. By incorporating diverse cultural perspectives, alternative models of mind–environment relationships emerge, and modeling these dynamics within a coupling scheme provides a robust framework for capturing the closed-loop, reciprocal processes that characterize natural phenomena.

Abstract

Ever since Kant ascribed an a priori intuition of space to human consciousness, scientists and philosophers have wondered how the phenomenology of spatial experience comes about and how it relates to neural mechanisms of consciousness. Here we will examine possible explanations of space perception from different theoretical frameworks, scrutinize their predictions and present new results speaking to their validity. First, Integrated Information Theory (IIT) predicts that experiences of spatial extendedness correspond to particular types of cause-effect structures specified by grid-like networks (e.g. those in retinotopic cortex). Inactivating many neurons in grid-like areas, even when inactive, should modify spatial experience. Additionally, connectivity changes between visual cortex neurons will affect visuospatial experience. In contrast, Predictive Processing (PP) accounts of consciousness postulate that the brain internally generates models of the world and body that encompass spatial extendedness. Here, spatial extendedness arises as part of an inferential representation built on prior knowledge and updated by newly arriving sensory inputs. The PP-Active Inference account holds that active sampling of the sensorium (e.g. by eye movements) is required to produce spatial conscious sensations. A second PP-based account – Neurorepresentationalism - claims that such actions are not necessary for consciousness and that the spatial experience arises from the alignment between visual, somatosensory, vestibular and other senses. Based on these theories, we will present results from a Structured Adversarial Collaboration (INTREPID) and further, independent research on the role of entorhinal grid cells in shaping human spatial experience, reviewing empirical evidence obtained from patients, healthy humans and animals.

Rationale on symposium's general scientific interest

Philosophers of mind have wondered about the nature of spatial experience for centuries, but surprisingly little is known about underlying brain mechanisms. Neural substrates of spatial localization and navigation have been studied before, but structural and physiological aspects of space perception, including the sense of self, have been barely touched upon so far. Furthermore, a better understanding of space perception mechanisms may lead to new treatments for brain disorders such as hemineglect, visual field defects and Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, this symposium will highlight how structured adversarial collaboration works in practice, and which questions it raises for future work.

Rationale on complementarity of talks

The talks are complementary in techniques and disciplines, as they present data on optogenetics and electrophysiology (discipline: animal physiology), psychophysics and fMRI imaging in healthy humans (discipline: psychology), assessments of scotomata in stroke patients and non-invasive brain stimulation (discipline: clinical neuroscience). Simultaneously, the talks will be complementary in the species under study: mice and humans. The talks will also differ in theoretical focus: some theoretical predictions under scrutiny relate strongly to IIT, others more to Predictive Processing. Finally, the talks will reveal a build-up in aggregate levels: from cells, via networks and regions, to macroscopic systems and behavior.

Rationale on timeliness/importance

This symposium challenges three hotly debated theories of consciousness. Critical tests of these theories have been largely lacking. Experimental results will be presented for the first time and will thus offer breaking news. Moreover, we present a multidisciplinary approach with cutting-edge methodologies, including patterned optogenetics in task-performing mice, human psychophysics, EEG and fMRI, and non-invasive brain stimulation. Furthermore, duplication of experiments in different labs and open-science practices are used to assess reproducibility. Finally, the contributions are timely due to their links to neurotechnological applications and the question of consciousness in self-driving vehicles with spatial localization and navigation capabilities.

Rationale on panel inclusivity

Two speakers are female (Boly and Montabes de la Cruz), two are male (Takahashi and Blanke). One speaker is from Asia (Takahashi), while the other three are from Europe (Belgium, Spain, Switzerland). Their academic institutes of employment are located on two continents (Europe and U.S.A.). Furthermore, the speakers vary in seniority: two speakers are at early career stages (postdoc/PhD student; Takahashi and Montabes de la Cruz), one is tenure-track (Boly) and one full professor (Blanke). Finally, the speakers represent different theoretical directions and have been trained in three different disciplines: clinical neuroscience (2x), psychology (1x) and fundamental neuroscience (1x).

Abstract

This symposium unites cross-species, cross-modal research to investigate brain states linked to consciousness, aiming to pinpoint neural correlates and ultimately enhance treatments for disorders of consciousness (DoC).

Across species, perturbations of consciousness have been consistently associated with changes in the dynamical regime of brain activity and connectivity. We explore recent insights into brain-state origins and mechanisms in humans and non-human animals (macaques, marmosets, mice, and hamsters) during physiological, pharmacological, and pathological consciousness disruptions—such as sleep, anesthesia, DoC, epilepsy, torpor, and psychedelics. This research combines functional MRI for spatial insights with electrophysiology for layer- and frequency-specific resolution. To highlight translational potential, we discuss direct comparisons of brain dynamics from the same modality (functional MRI) and same perturbation (anaesthesia) across human, macaque, marmoset and mouse.

We also delve into pharmacological (amantadine, zolpidem) and brain stimulation (transcranial direct current stimulation, deep brain stimulation) methods to restore consciousness and associated brain states. We provide evidence of subjective experiences triggered by intracranial stimulation in human patients and the reversal of anesthesia effects in macaques via deep-brain stimulation. We argue that limited success in current therapeutic approaches for DoC patients might stem from insufficiently targeted brain-state interventions.

Finally, we integrate these diverse findings into a coherent mechanistic account, using whole-brain biophysical modelling based on species-specific structural connectivity and gene expression. We propose that an integrated framework might help identify consistent neural mechanisms related to consciousness, and advance the scientific study of consciousness and lead to the development of better-targeted therapies for patients suffering from DoC.

Rationale on symposium's general scientific interest

The neurobiological mechanisms that support consciousness and may permit its restoration in clinical populations remain poorly understood - leaving a pressing unmet scientific and clinical need. The neural-behavioural manifestations of sleep and pharmacology resemble DoC and are highly phylogenetically conserved, offering potential for studying consciousness in species that are more amenable to invasive experimental manipulations, and translating the resulting insights back to humans.

Our symposium distills experimental and computational evidence about bi-directional causal manipulations of brain and consciousness across species. These mechanistic insights about the structural and neuromodulatory determinants of brain activity will be relevant for scientific and medical audiences alike.

Rationale on complementarity of talks

Our talks offer synergy across multiple dimensions. First, by studying diverse species: humans (for subjective reports), rodents (for invasive manipulation), and non-human primates (for translational insights). Second, we explore varied perturbations, including human brain injuries (with clinical relevance), natural sleep, and controlled pharmacological interventions like anesthesia and psychedelics. Third, we combine broad functional MRI coverage with electrophysiology's layer- and frequency-specific insights. Integrating focal intracranial and deep-brain stimulation with whole-brain interventions allows us to link local and global aspects of consciousness. Finally, computational models deepen our causal understanding. This integrative approach advances neuromodulation targets and clarifies consciousness mechanisms across species.

Rationale on timeliness/importance

The science of consciousness is advancing rapidly with new tools for recording, model organisms, and causal interventions revealing neural mechanisms underlying conscious states. Yet, treatments for disorders of consciousness (DoC) remain limited. Research on brain states and consciousness is often disconnected from brain stimulation approaches. This symposium unites findings across species using advanced brain recording and stimulation techniques, offering insights into consciousness correlates and treatment possibilities for DoC. We demonstrate how modulating specific neural targets impacts consciousness, supported by computational models and detailed connectivity maps of human and macaque brains, enabling meaningful predictions of brain perturbation effects.

Rationale on panel inclusivity

Our panelists come from diverse countries across three continents, with most trained and working outside their home countries. The group is gender-balanced and spans academic ranks, from postdoc to full professor. Expertise spans species—from humans and clinical patients (DL, AIL, JA) to non-human primates and mammals (MJR, AIL, VV)—and techniques, including MRI (AIL, DL, JA), transcriptomics (AIL), electrophysiology (MJR, DL), and pharmacology (AIL, MJR, VV). Disciplines include circuit and systems neuroscience (MJR, VV), clinical neuroscience (AIL, DL, JA), philosophy, cognitive science (AIL, MJR, JA, DL), and engineering (AIL), enriching our perspectives on consciousness research.

Altered states of consciousness (ASCs) refer to alternate patterns of experience which differ from a normal waking state, such as psilocybin or LSD intake. Psychedelic drugs, however, pose risks, including health concerns and lack of experimental control due to metabolic variability. Multi-modal Ganzfeld (MMGF) is a non-pharmacological method for inducing ASCs, by homogenizing visual and auditory input, leading to pseudo-hallucinations similar to those seen with psychedelics. While previous studies have used different light colors in MMGF, no consensus exists on which wavelength best optimizes pseudo-hallucination intensity. Our study aims to determine the most effective MMGF setup by manipulating light wavelength while maintaining exposure to unstructured white noise. Using a repeated-measures design, 33 participants will undergo 25-minute MMGF sessions with either red or green light. We will assess ASCs using the 5-Dimensional Altered States of Consciousness Rating Scale and a phenomenological interview. Additionally, cardiac, cerebral, and electrodermal activity will be recorded to examine arousal changes associated with different wavelengths. We hypothesize that red light will enhance pseudo-hallucinations more than green light, as suggested by previous studies on perception and arousal. By determining the optimal MMGF parameters, will expect to refine ASC induction methods, providing a controlled, accessible, and safe alternative for studying ASCs in experimental and clinical protocols.

Altered states of consciousness (ASCs) share a common phenomenological structure regardless of induction method, as proposed by the etiology independence hypothesis (Fort, under review; Dittrich, 1998). With increasing interest in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, identifying clinically relevant phenomenological dimensions and understanding the degree to which induction methods elicit them is crucial (Fort, under review; Yaden et al., 2024). This preliminary study compared ASCs induced by psilocybin (0.17 mg/kg; Mortaheb & Fort, 2024) and multi-modal Ganzfeld (MMGF) using the 5-Dimensional Altered States of Consciousness (5D-ASC) Rating Scale. No significant difference in general score was observed between psilocybin and MMGF. Dimension-level analysis revealed psilocybin produced greater scores on Oceanic Boundlessness (OBN) and Visionary Restructuralization (VRS). Factor-level analysis revealed psilocybin as significantly higher in Blissful State, Insightfulness, Audio-Visual Synesthesia, and Changed Meaning of Percepts scores. The largest effect size was observed for Changed Meaning of Percepts. No significant differences were found in Elementary or Complex Imagery scores, suggesting MMGF may be a hallucinogenic equivalent to psilocybin. OBN differences align with findings showing it mediates psilocybin's therapeutic effects on depression further supported by the strong correlation its egotropic effects have with its hyperconnected pattern (von Rotz et al., 2023; Mortaheb & Fort, 2024). Differences in VRS are more complex. At the factor level, it seems to be driven by meaning shifts and not the production of content, suggesting an important caveat for the 5D-ASC (Fort, under review). Together, these preliminary findings suggest MMGF as an alternative for studying hallucinations when access to psychedelics is limited.

Visual hallucinations can be phenomenologically divided into those of a simple or complex nature. Both types of hallucinations can be induced experimentally through light manipulations, specifically, through high-frequency, eyes-open flicker (Ganzflicker) and perceptual deprivation (Ganzfeld). We investigate the mechanisms underlying the hallucinations elicited by these methods in a series of behavioural experiments.

In Experiment 1, we show using button presses, drawings, interviews, and retrospective questionnaires of hallucinatory intensity that while simple hallucinations are more frequent during Ganzflicker and therefore primarily bottom-up driven, complex hallucinations are relatively more common during Ganzfeld and are likely driven by top-down processes acting independently of visual stimulation. Having found that simple hallucinations are primarily driven by bottom-up processes, Experiment 2 explores how a shifting weighting between prior knowledge and sensory input may predict complex hallucination formation. Specifically, we tested older individuals, who ostensibly have increased top-down influences on perception due to an accumulation of knowledge and multi-sensory loss. Contrary to our hypotheses, older adults are less prone to complex visual hallucinations than younger adults, suggesting that in our sample, top-down influence accumulated throughout age does not overtly impact the tendency to experience hallucinations with semantic meaning.

Finally, we present preliminary data from Experiment 3, in which we perturb these processes with a low (“micro”) dose of psilocybin. We expect that psilocybin will enhance both simple and complex hallucinations by stimulating cortical pattern formation via 5-HT2A receptors in early visual cortices and inducing cortical noise in higher-order and feedback regions, which may be misinterpreted as signal.

During Ganzfeld stimulation, participants are exposed to unstructured sensory stimuli, such as an edgeless visual field with uniform light and monotonous auditory input. A previous study found that alpha power was stronger during conditions of Ganzfeld stimulation and eyes-closed rest relative to eyes-open rest (Miskovic et al., 2019). This effect has been interpreted to reflect an attentional shift away from externally-generated stimuli, and towards internal mentation. However, alpha power also strengthens with sleepiness, raising the question of whether the changes in alpha power observed during Ganzfeld reflect a shift in attentional orientation or fluctuations in arousal state. In this study, we replicate a previous Ganzfeld paradigm while measuring subjective sleepiness across conditions. Participants (N = 10) underwent resting-state EEG recordings (eyes open and closed) followed by Ganzfeld stimulation, and completed the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale after each five-minute block. Our results show that alpha power changes across conditions in a manner that is similar to the previous study. Importantly, changes in alpha power co-vary with changes in subjective sleepiness across conditions. These findings suggest that arousal may contribute to the changes in alpha rhythms observed during unstructured sensory stimulation. We will examine whether these findings persist with a larger sample size.

Mental health research is increasingly recognising the well-being potential of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) mediated by psychedelics and mind-body practices such as yoga, meditation and breathwork; however, their neurophysiological mechanisms and the direct ways in which these are correlated with subjective experiences requires further research into mechanisms, modes of action and further theoretical development. Capturing the dynamic interplay between measurable changes and reported first-hand experiences remains challenging due to the typical use of methodologies and measurement techniques lacking in temporal resolution. In this talk, I will discuss my current PhD study, which seeks to combine the use of portable Electroencephalography (EEG) and a novel phenomenological reporting system, namely, Temporal Experience Tracing (TET) developed at the Cambridge Consciousness and Cognition Lab, to capture the phenomenological granularity/intensity of ASCs elicited by Kundalini Yoga, and correlate them with observable fluctuations in neuroimaging data. The study’s objective is to shed light on the neurophenomenology of ASCs, to more accurately characterise the potential triggers of non-pharmacological altered states (such as proxy-hypoxic states), and evaluate Kundalini Yoga as a potential intervention for common mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety. I will discuss the results from my first pilot study involving 32 EEG and TET datasets across 8 participants and a further full study planned for April 2025. The results from these studies will inform the development of a neurophenomenology clinical trial, and inspire further studies to infer the neural correlates of ASC subtypes, such as blissful, equanimous and mystical states.

We present a comparison of complexity measures applied to EEG data recorded during pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness (ASCs). Our primary aim is to assess the performance of complexity measures, including Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZc), Statistical Complexity and Complexity via State-space Entropy Rate. We evaluate their sensitivity, specificity and amount of data required for reliably differentiating ASCs from baseline states. Each of these measures has theoretical advantages and limitations but have not been compared empirically.

Since Tononi & Edelman’s early popularisation of complexity approaches, a major challenge remains in formalising empirical measures that can quantify global brain states, and how these may constrain theories of consciousness (Seth & Bayne, 2022; Kirkeby-Hinrup, 2024). Psychedelics provide a powerful experimental tool to investigate correlations between phenomenology and neural complexity. Findings converge on increased neural signal diversity in the psychedelic state, often interpreted as reflecting the richness of experience (Carhart-Harris, 2018). Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZc) has demonstrated remarkable success in differentiating conscious states, and although debates continue surrounding its suitability for capturing conscious content, remains the dominant measure in psychedelic research (Casali et al., 2013; Schartner et al., 2015; Lewis-Healey et al., 2024).

We describe our approach for evaluating complexity measures across datasets, and present preliminary findings from EEG data for psilocybin (macro)dosing and LSD microdosing. Our findings will contribute to the broader discussion on how different metrics might capture dimensions of experience and highlight key methodological considerations for selection and interpretation in future studies.

Issues of pathological canalization—including depression, anxiety, addiction, and PTSD—have recently seen treatment inroads. Among the most effective treatments are psychedelic and dissociative-assisted psychotherapy, as well as TMS/ultrasound neuromodulation. In these, it is proposed that the primary mechanism for acute changes that give way to enduring changes is “temperature or entropy Mediated plasticity” (TEMP) (Carhart-Harris et al., 2023). Given this, we have developed experiments that explore the possibility of inducing TEMP without the need for direct pharmacological/neural modulation. In these, we present intensive visual, audio, and tactile stimulus in a VR context, to the end of reaching hyperplastic states that can lead to lasting positive behavioral changes.

In a pilot study (MTurk, N=78), we examined a visual stimulus based on a psychedelic aid selected for its apparent dissociative qualities.

The following study (N=53) involved intensive visual, auditory, and tactile stimulus in a VR context, measuring wellbeing, connectedness, depression, anxiety, divergent association, altered states/acute dissociation, as well as meaning and meaning-making.

Our current study (ongoing, targeting N=40), introduces breathwork as a tool for increasing arousal and setting a baseline. We are also evaluating HRV and focusing our measures on evaluating whether the subjectively altered state we induce is a practical proxy for psychedelics and/or dissociatives.

We will present the results from these studies—in short, there has been some indication that these kinds of stimuli show promise as tools for accessing the benefits of TEMP, though individual differences play a substantial role in determining the effects of our stimuli.

This work presents the design and implementation of a novel bio-responsive virtual reality (VR) system that augments breathwork to induce altered states of consciousness (ASCs). Breathwork has demonstrated efficacy in eliciting ASCs comparable to psychedelics (Bahi et al., 2024; Lewis-Healey et al., 2024). Our system synchronizes user breathing patterns with dynamic spatial transformations in VR environments—expansion during inhalation and contraction during exhalation—leveraging embodied cognition to enhance immersive experiences. Building on findings that inhalation and exhalation influence perceptions of quantities and magnitude (Belli et al., 2021). We integrate these concepts to create immersive environments using Gestalt principles to dynamically adapt the sense of space to the user's breath. First pilot data exhibits the impact of this breathwork intervention on subjective states as assessed via psychometric time series (experience graphs) and standardized questionnaire for measuring ASCs. Further research explores reverse coupling mechanisms, where spatial contraction aligns with lung expansion, aiming to evoke body transformation illusions such as the sensation of growing while surrounding space shrinks, and investigates behavioral outcomes, including body size perception. Moreover, we apply neurophysiological measures to investigate the dynamic rescaling of peripersonal space through neural adaptation mechanisms (Noel et al., 2018) that are elicited via multisensory integration mechanisms (Serino et al., 2018). The VR system will be demonstrated after the presentation, allowing attendees to experience its functionality firsthand. Further information can be found at: https://www.aliusresearch.org/viscereality.html

As a serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) agonist, psilocybin elicits altered states of consciousness, consisting of changes in perception, distortions of time, and a range of “mystical experiences”. Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) of psilocybin therapy (PT) report rapid and robust antidepressant effects in patients with depressive disorders. All trials have administered psilocybin at doses of 20 to 30 mg in conjunction with several hours of psychological support. However, the mechanisms of PT’s antidepressant effects remain unknown. Although 5-HT2A agonism (and hence psychedelic effects) may be critical, antidepressant effects may also be mediated through rapid activation of other critical 5-HT receptors, downstream effects on synaptic growth, attentive psychological support, or a combination of all these factors. This session will describe the design of two ongoing RCTs at our centre in Toronto, Canada that aim to characterize PT’s mechanism of antidepressant action. The first is a “double dummy” RCT of psilocybin combined with risperidone in 60 adults with treatment resistant depression (TRD) to determine whether psilocybin’s antidepressant effects are dependent on 5-HT2AR agonism. The study is using risperidone, a potent blocker of the 5-HT2AR, because a previous study in healthy volunteers showed that risperidone 1 mg effectively blocks psilocybin’s psychedelic effects. The second RCT will determine whether psilocybin treatment with accompanying psychotherapy is superior to psilocybin treatment with safety monitoring for 40 adults with TRD. The current trials will address key unanswered questions in the field of psychedelic research and inform future clinical trial protocols and treatment guidelines with definitive global impact.

Music and ritual play vital roles across traditional and modern psychedelic experiences (1). However, neuroscientific research exploring this crucial interplay remains sparse. The Santo Daime Church uses ayahuasca together with music to have deeply meaningful experiences of the divine (2) and 24 members took part in a semi-naturalistic study, allowing for the examination of associated causal changes in the brain’s functional hierarchy.

Utilising whole-brain modelling with trophic coherence hierarchy metrics, we assessed how presence of Santo Daime ceremonial music, and manipulations to this music’s familiarity and predictability, moderate ayahuasca's effects on the hierarchy. Similar methods previously showed distinct hierarchical reconfigurations following LSD with and without music (3).

Findings indicated a significant flattening of the functional hierarchy following ayahuasca ingestion, during both resting states and music listening, in line with the predictions of the REBUS (Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics) model (4). Notably, these effects appear to be modulated by the familiarity and predictability of the music.

This work underscores the integral role of music in modulating psychedelic experience, highlighting how variations in music can affect the functional hierarchy, and how this may allow the study of deeply meaningful experiences.

1. Jerotic K, Vuust P, Kringelbach ML. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2024;1531(1).

2. Hartogsohn I. Front Pharmacol. 2021;12.

3. Shinozuka K, et al. Imaging Neurosci. 2025;3.

4. Carhart-Harris RL, Friston KJ. Pharmacol Rev. 2019;71(3).

Background: Recent interest in psychedelic compounds, particularly psilocybin, has expanded beyond clinical outcomes to explore their impact on conscious experience and cognitive processes. This study aimed to delineate how psilocybin influences the neural correlates of reward-based decision-making, focusing on the intersection of altered states of consciousness and reinforcement learning.

Methods: In a within-subject design, participants received either 1.5 g of psilocybin-containing mushrooms or an inactive placebo before completing a probabilistic reward learning task. Choices yielded positive or negative outcomes at varying probabilities, permitting assessment of feedback-driven adaptations in behavior. Event-related potentials (ERPs), including Contingent Negative Variation (CNV), Stimulus-Preceding Negativity (SPN), Reward Positivity (RewP), Late-Positive Potential (LPP), Feedback-Related Negativity (FRN), Error-Related Negativity (ERN), and Feedback-P3 (FB-P3), were recorded to capture neural indices of saliency, expectancy, and affective valuation during reward processing.

Results: Preliminary findings indicate differential ERP responses between the psilocybin and placebo conditions, reflecting changes in reward dynamics. Behavioral data also show an increase in erroneous responses under psilocybin, suggesting modifications in how feedback signals are integrated and acted upon. These outcomes hint at the possibility that altered conscious states may influence attention and affective components of decision-making.

Conclusions: This work suggests that psilocybin can reshape the processes involved in reward-based learning. By examining how altered states of consciousness intersect with core neural and behavioral markers, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms through which psychedelic-assisted interventions might benefit mental health conditions.

While there is consistency in the EEG power and complexity findings across psychedelic studies, this is not the case for the connectivity analyses. In this study, we investigate the effect of DMT (N, N, Dimethyltryptamine), a highly potent psychedelic compound, on Weighted Symbolic Mutual Information (wSMI) (King et al., 2013). wSMI is a functional connectivity metric that reflects the integration of computational processes in the brain and is the only connectivity metric that characterises nonlinear interaction dynamics (Imperatori et al 2020). We used wSMI to construct the connectivity network, and we employed graph network measures, such as the clustering coefficient (CC), a metric of local segregation, and the characteristic path length (CPL), a metric of global network efficiency.

Thirteen participants were exposed to separate placebo and DMT sessions during which their EEG activity and real-time subjective ratings of the intensity of experience were collected (Timmermann et al., 2019). The EEG data was utilised to compute the wSMI connectivity and the subsequent graph network metrics. We observed a significant increase in the CPL and a decrease in the CC during the DMT session compared to the placebo, notably pronounced in the alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (12-30 Hz) EEG bands, along with a positive correlation with the ratings. These findings indicate a decrease in segregation and efficiency during DMT. This results in the brain functioning more irregularly and suggests a temporary disruption of the brain networks, facilitating flexible network reconfigurations necessary for improved performance in everyday tasks, thereby promoting plasticity.

The use of low doses of psychedelic substances (microdosing) is attracting increasing interest. Proponents of microdosing claim a wide range of clinically relevant cognitive enhancement effects. However, ongoing questions around efficacy, appropriate doses, and the role of expectation have led to confusion and controversy in microdosing science. In particular, the popularity of microdosing forces us to consider whether it may be possible for psychedelics to enhance cognition in the absence of marked alterations in consciousness.

To help unpack these issues I will present results of two recent reviews summarising all empirical microdosing research until 2024, including a set of infrequently cited studies that took place prior to prohibition.

Specifically, we reviewed 55 studies published since 1955, and summarised reported effects across six categories: neurobiological, physiological, phenomenological, affective, cognitive, and mental health.

Studies showed a wide range in risk of bias, depending on design, age, and other study characteristics. Laboratory studies found changes in pain perception, time perception, conscious state, mood, and neurophysiology. Self-report studies found changes in cognitive processing and mental health.

I will discuss methodological issues in microdosing research, and in particular will evaluate recent claims that microdosing may be a placebo effect. I aim to highlight differences between acute and enduring microdosing effects, and provide some specific design suggestions to facilitate more rigorous future research.

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has shown promise in alleviating treatment-resistant depression by combining psychotherapy with psychedelic substances. While prior research has elucidated the neuropharmacological and subjective aspects of psychedelic therapy, the role of interpersonal dynamics remains understudied. Building on evidence from conventional psychotherapy that underscores the therapeutic alliance as one of the most robust predictors of clinical outcomes, my PhD research aims to fill this gap by systematically assessing the co-creation of non-ordinary states of consciousness that are central to the therapeutic process in psychedelic therapy for depression. We investigate interpersonal cardiovascular synchrony as an index of the intersubjective field in ketamine- and psilocybin-assisted therapy (during pre-dosing, dosing, and integration) conducted at McGill University’s Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. Data collection for the Ketamine therapy with 24 participants across 5 sessions is ongoing, the psilocybin trial with 15 participants who receive 2 doses of psilocybin has received Health Canada approval and is currently undergoing internal ethics review. Building on temporary social neuroscience findings, we examine how interpersonal physiological synchrony, reflected in mutual information exchange between electrocardiogram signals of patients and clinicians, converge with linguistic content, and self-reported measures of therapeutic alliance and psychedelic states. By integrating phenomenological insight, neurobiological measures, and established psychotherapeutic frameworks, my research advances our understanding of the relational nature of altered states of consciousness as they come to be in psychedelic therapy. Through assessing how co-created experiences in psychedelic therapy may moderate therapeutic outcomes, we ultimately seek to inform both clinical practice and theoretical models of consciousness.

Recent advances in studying psychedelics and related compounds have deepened our understanding of their neurophysiological effects and potential for exploring consciousness. While psychedelics like LSD, entactogens such as MDMA, and amphetamines like d-amphetamine share certain pharmacological properties, they also exhibit distinct neurophysiological effects. Moreover, individual psychedelics often possess unique neuropharmacological profiles. Understanding these commonalities and differences is vital for linking subtle neurochemical variations to profound changes in conscious experience.

This study used resting-state fMRI data from two independent cohorts to compare LSD’s effects with d-amphetamine and MDMA in one cohort, and with psilocybin and mescaline in another. Data were collected during peak effects under consistent protocols.

Connectivity metrics included network integrity, segregation, seed-based connectivity, and global connectivity. Results revealed shared and distinct effects: all substances decreased integrity in the visual network, but only psychedelics significantly reduced default-mode network (DMN) integrity. Psychedelics reduced network segregation, whereas amphetamines increased segregation between networks. Regarding seed-based connectivity, LSD exhibited stronger connectivity across seed networks compared to amphetamines. Furthermore, psychedelics also showed differential modulation within seed networks. Voxel-wise comparisons further highlighted nuanced differences both within (e.g., LSD vs. psilocybin) and between pharmacological classes (e.g., psychedelics vs. amphetamines).

The findings from these unique datasets emphasize the distinct neurophysiological profiles of psychedelics and related compounds, suggesting they modulate brain connectivity in ways that are both class-dependent and compound-specific. Furthermore, they highlight the potential of these substances to probe varying alterations in consciousness.

Classical psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) induce an altered state of consciousness through partial agonism at the 5-Hydroxytryptamine-2A receptor (5-HT2AR). It is debated, though, what core cognitive computational mechanism mediates these effects. We conducted a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial testing the effects of low doses of LSD (0, 10, 20 µg; LSD base-equivalent doses) on visual perceptual decision making alongside electroencephalography (EEG) measurement and high-frequency eye-tracking. With this, we seek to unravel how LSD affects the relative weighting and the interaction of feedforward and feedback signals towards constructing perception.

To that end, we used a set of tasks probing distinct effects of context on perception which provide insight into a variety of EEG signatures of feedback and feedforward signaling. Specifically, we tested the effects of LSD in three two-alternative-forced choice tasks. The first task investigated evidence accumulation in an environment subject to hidden state changes. The second task tested the adaptation of visual serial dependence to block-wise manipulation of statistical regularities in the stimulus sequences. The third task tested visual contrast surround suppression, where observers underestimate contrasts embedded in a high-contrast surround.

The results will crucially advance our understanding of the basic mechanisms by which classical psychedelics alter perception. This has implications for the role of serotonin in perception in health and illness as well as for the use of psychedelics in psychiatry.

Recent research has focused on how psychedelics and empathogens may assist in the treatment of PTSD and depression following trauma. However, there is almost no knowledge regarding how psychoactive substances may impact the processing of Traumatic Events (TE) in real time. The large-scale terror attack by Hamas on October 7th 2023 on the 4000 attendees of the Supernova music festival has provided a tragic opportunity to study these two phenomena in conjunction. The attack took place shortly after sunrise, when many attendees were under the influence of mind-altering substances, mostly MDMA, LSD, ketamine and, as well as cannabis. This is an unprecedented mass trauma event that many of its victims experienced while in altered states of consciousness. We have begun a large-scale, longitudinal study with these survivors regarding the processing of trauma under the influence of psychedelics in the peritraumatic and post traumatic periods. Our results indicate that approximately 65% of the participants were exposed to severe trauma while under the influence of mind-altering substances. In this talk I will show preliminary results from this unique cohort including clinical (n = 1400), physiological (n = 300), cognitive (n = 900) and neural (fMRI) measures (n = 140) and how they relate to trauma and psychedelic use. The data and experiences of the courageous survivors of the festival provide novel insights into how trauma processing is impacted by psychoactive substances revealing unique interactions between cognitive, pharmacological and clinical factors.

The literature on psychedelic experiences, and especially mystical psychedelic experiences, often highlights their transformative potential. Laurie Paul (2014) introduces the concept of “transformative experiences,” which bring about extreme, irreversible changes in personality, values, and worldview. Paul uses the fictional example of someone being offered to permanently turn into a vampire: becoming a vampire is a decision that cannot be made based on someone's human value system, because their future vampire self will have an entirely different set of values that they might not even ben able to comprehend yet. Similarly, having children is a leap of faith: the transformation reshapes priorities and values irreversibly.

Psychedelic experiences are often described as transformative in this sense. Edward Jacobs (2023) argues that this raises ethical questions about informed consent in psychedelic-assisted therapy, since such experiences might profoundly alter a person’s value system, rendering pre-experience consent problematic. Many people report significant life changes following psychedelic experiences. However, I will argue that most psychedelic experiences are not transformative in Paul’s sense. Transformations like becoming a vampire or a parent alter not only someone's values, priorities and beliefs, but also their environments and relationships in a way that the subject has little control over. In contrast, psychedelic experiences are often contingent on individual agency. Without conscious effort to implement changes, life often reverts to its previous state. My talk will explore this distinction, examine cases of reversed transformations, and propose relational approaches to support lasting change.

Unlike qualitative features like 'redness,' duration is likely the only common attribute between qualia and their neural substrates. Thus, time-varying experiential dimensions and neural recordings can be seen as noisy measurements of a shared dynamical system, with each point on a latent manifold representing a joint neural-phenomenological state. We propose a framework for learning these latent state-spaces to identify which phenomenological dimensions best reconstruct multivariate neural signals, and vice-versa. This approach was applied to 12 temporal experience traces (TET) dimensions related to altered states of consciousness, collected after EEG scans during DMT administration.

Grounded in Takens' theorem, we derived a latent representation of shared dynamics between neural activity and subjective experience, using delay-embedded TET dimensions as inputs to a variational auto-encoder (VAE). From this latent-space we reconstructed EEG power and connectivity measures. TET reflecting participants’ memory of the auditory component of the DMT experience produced the best out-of-sample EEG reconstructions, with a mean distance correlation of 0.64 (R² = 0.44).

We then trained a VAE to learn a six-dimensional representation from a joint delay-embedding of 12 TET and 25 EEG dimensions. The model successfully reconstructed neural and behavioral inputs, achieving R² values of 0.516 and 0.966, respectively. We present brain-states reconstructed from this model, reflecting idealized, synthetic, altered states of consciousness: specifically, temporal distortion and entity encounters.

Our findings serve as a proof of concept for the viability of jointly modeling neural and subjective time series as a single joint dynamical system.

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a classical serotonergic psychedelic, is known for its vivid visual and somatic effects, making it a valuable tool for studying the neuroscience of consciousness (Strassman et al., Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1994). We investigated the neurobiological mechanisms of DMT-induced altered state of consciousness by examining how the spatiotemporal dynamics of large-scale brain activity patterns evolve over time.

We analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from seventeen healthy participants during acute DMT and placebo administration in a crossover study (Timmermann et al., PNAS. 2023). Using a turbulence framework inspired by fluid dynamics (Deco, Kringelbach, Cell Reports. 2020), we measured local synchronization of coupled brain signals. This framework describes how synchronized brain activity forms a turbulent core, facilitating information processing through rotational vortices, akin to those in fluids. Additionally, we characterized the dynamics of vortex-like rotational wave patterns, known as brain spirals. Synchronization and vorticity were examined both, in a time-averaged and a time-resolved manner, providing detailed, moment-by-moment profiles of their evolution.

Our results demonstrate that DMT reduces global brain synchronization and its variability, while simultaneously increasing global vorticity and its variance. Notably, these measures display distinct, time-resolved fluctuations that evolve dynamically and diverge significantly from those observed under placebo condition.

These findings suggest that DMT induces a state of desynchronization and heightened dynamic complexity in brain activity. Investigating these time-resolved features provides novel insights into how DMT alters brain dynamics and could serve as a tool for predicting subjective experience, advancing our understanding of consciousness under psychedelics.

Information theory provides a versatile and robust framework for investigating the intricate behaviours of complex systems, such as the human brain. Recent advancements in the field have increasingly been applied to computational neuroscience, offering researchers powerful tools to analyse how neural information flows and integrates across different regions of the brain. These methods have proven particularly promising in the study of consciousness, enabling quantitative characterization of various states of consciousness.

In this study, we leverage the framework of Integrated Information Decomposition (PhiID) to examine the effects of psychedelic drugs on the brain's informational organization. PhiID allows us to break down the system's information dynamics into fine-grained components, shedding light on how information is transferred, stored, and processed in the human brain under placebo and psychedelic conditions. By combining this approach with Vector Autoregression (VAR) models, we analyse MEG data from participants under placebo and psychedelic substances (ketamine, LSD, psilocybin). This enables us to assess differences in cortical dynamics between the two states.

Our findings reveal that, overall, there is a higher magnitude of information in placebo states, aligning with prior claims that psychedelic conditions increase neural complexity. Furthermore, psychedelic states exhibit an increase in persistent redundancy and a decrease in persistent synergy, indicating a substantial reorganisation of the brain's modes of segregation and integration.

These results offer valuable insights into the neural correlates of conscious experience, providing a deeper understanding of how information is synthesized and organized across different states of consciousness.

Introduction:

Psychedelics have gained increasing interest in scientific research due to their ability to induce profound alterations in state of consciousness. However, the research regarding the functioning of individuals who use psychedelics in naturalistic contexts remains limited. To fill this gap we explored neuropsychophysiological differences between naturalistic psychedelics users and non-users in terms of processing of self-related thoughts.

Methods:

We used behavioural testing combined with electroencephalography with source localisation. To mitigate potential confounding effects of personality traits and personal history which makes one willing to take psychedelics, we compared users to individuals who did not take psychedelics, but are intending to do so in the future. We included two datasets collected at two different laboratories.

Results:

The results from Dataset I (N = 70) suggest that during self-related thoughts psychedelics users exhibit weaker increases in alpha and beta power in comparison to non-users, primarily in brain regions linked to processing of self-related information (such as posterior cingulate cortex). Analysis of Dataset II (N = 38) did not replicate between-group effects. Analysis of combined datasets showed similar results as findings from Dataset I alone.

Conclusions:

While non-replicability restricts interpretation of our findings, our research expands the ongoing discussion on strength and duration of the psychedelic effects. Our results fit into growing skepticism about the specificity of the role of default-mode network in processes associated with psychedelics experience. By focusing on the intersection of psychedelics, brain function, and self-consciousness, our study contributes to understanding altered states of consciousness and perfectly aligns with ASSC scope.

Introduction:

Psychedelics profoundly alter consciousness, influencing perception, cognition, and mood (Wallach, 2009). Prolonged use has been linked to improved psychological well-being (Nichols, 2005; Nagai et al., 2007). 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), a serotonin receptor agonist (Spencer et al., 1987), occurs naturally in mammals (Abiero et al., 2019), plants, and animals, most notably in the secretion of the Incilius alvarius toad (Jiang & Shen, 2015). Its ability to induce mystical experiences (Walsh, 1982) and ego dissolution (MacLean et al., 2011; Erritzoe et al., 2018) highlights its therapeutic potential.

Aims & Methods:

While current studies have mainly focused on brain dynamics or therapeutic outcomes in naturalistic settings (Uthaug et al., 2019; Blackmore et al., 2024), this study comprehensively investigates the subjective effects of 5-MeO-DMT-induced altered states of consciousness in a controlled clinical environment. By utilising sophisticated methods such as experience sampling and Microphenomenology, the study goes beyond standard Likert scale measures, which fail to capture the richness of subjective experiences.

This placebo-controlled, single-blind study assessed 32 participants over two dosing sessions separated by two weeks. Experience sampling and microphenomenological interviews were employed to explore subjective effects.

Results:

Preliminary findings reveal significant alterations in subjective states, including ego dissolution (or the sense of “self”) aligning with established psychedelic models. Analysis is currently underway.

Conclusion:

This study advances understanding of the subjective effects of 5-MeO-DMT, bridging a critical research gap and informing future investigations on its therapeutic potential. Findings contribute to expanding consciousness research and the development of psychedelic therapies.

The growing acceptance of psychedelics for therapeutic and research purposes underscores the need to optimize safety and efficacy of use. While psychedelic experiences can lead to profound therapeutic benefits, outcomes remain highly variable. The successful prediction of experience for a given individual will contribute not only to increased therapeutic efficacy but also answer more fundamental questions around the influence of “pre-state” on alterations in consciousness. This talk will explore research on “pre-state” as a predictor of psychedelic experience, drawing from our work on the Imperial Psychedelic Predictor Scale (Angyus et al., 2024) and a subsequent literature review (Murray et al., in prep) on the topic.

Our recent work has validated a short assessment of “pre-state” (set, rapport, and intention) which can significantly predict mystical, emotional breakthrough, and challenging experiences (Angyus et al, 2024). This work is an early step in a broader effort to map psychological “pre-state” qualities to the subsequent nature of a psychedelic experience and therapeutic outcomes.

One such effort is our application of this scale in a citizen science study design. We have developed a protocol with surveys and EEG recordings before, during, and after altered state experiences. By partnering with wearable EEG developer Interaxon, we have integrated this protocol directly in the Muse mobile application. This scalable approach hopes to generate the largest ever collection of psychedelic brain data. This effort will support the mission of mapping pre-state measures to acute experience and therapeutic outcomes, supporting the understanding of variables that impact changes in consciousness.

This presentation explores how psychedelic experiences function as Ontologically Diversifying Experiences (ODEs) by disrupting normative constructs of selfhood, relationships, and reality, thereby expanding cognitive, emotional, and existential repertoires. Drawing on three studies—Navigating Groundlessness (Argyri et al., 2024), which details how participants navigate destabilizing ontological shock; Learning from Boundlessness (Argyri et al., under review), which shows expanded concepts of normality and increased prosocial tendencies; and research on post-psychedelic changes in gender and sexual identity (Kruger et al., under review), which reveals shifts toward queerness and fluid understandings of identity—I demonstrate how psychedelics challenge entrenched assumptions and open avenues for psychological growth.

I further examine participant reports and quantitative data showing that these experiences can transform trauma into opportunities for growth, with social support and adaptive coping strategies mitigating the impact of ontological shock. By aligning these processes with the DE framework from socio-cognitive research (Gocłowska et al., 2018), I argue that psychedelics offer benefits beyond traditional mental health treatments by stimulating creative thinking, enhancing mental adaptability, thus catalyzing transformative insights into our self-identity, relationships, and understanding of reality.

The presentation concludes with practical implications for harm reduction and self-development, raising broader questions about psychedelics as catalysts for transforming human consciousness.

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a serotonergic psychedelic that induces a profoundly altered conscious state. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is a brain region that is known to be involved in mood regulation and disorders; hypofunction in the left DLPFC is associated with depression. This study investigated the role of the DLPFC in LSD’s psycho-emotional effects with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data of healthy participants during the acute LSD experience.

In the fMRI data, we measured the correlation between changes in resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) of the DLPFC and post-scan subjective ratings of positive mood, emotional arousal, and ego dissolution. Ego dissolution was significantly correlated with functional connectivity increases between the combined left & right DLPFC, thalamus, and the fusiform face area. Additionally, emotional arousal was significantly associated with increased connectivity between the right DLPFC, intraparietal sulcus, and the salience network. A confirmational “reverse” analysis, using the original RSFC clusters as input seeds substantiated the role of the right DLPFC and the aforementioned regions in both measures.

Utilizing a complimentary MEG dataset, we source-localized to the output clusters. The Granger causality analysis revealed that LSD increased information flow between two nodes of the ‘ego dissolution network’, the thalamus and the DLPFC, in the theta band, substantiating the hypothesis that disruptions in thalamic gating underlie the experience of ego dissolution.

Overall, this multimodal study elucidates a role for the DLPFC in LSD-induced states of consciousness and sheds more light on the brain basis of ego dissolution.

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a potent and fast-acting psychedelic drug that induces a radical reorganisation of the contents of consciousness, comprising the dissolution of time and space and perceptual immersion into an ‘alternate reality’. While contemporary research has somewhat advanced our understanding of DMT, and psychedelics more broadly, there is little research that integrates time-resolved measures of subjective experience with temporally fine-grained brain imaging. We therefore present the current study, a repeated-measures dose-dependent study of the subjective and neural dynamics induced through DMT under naturalistic conditions. Nineteen participants received either a 20mg or 40mg dose of freebase DMT across two dosing sessions in a blinded, counterbalanced order, with blinding rates consistent across doses. Electroencephalography (EEG) data was collected, as well as time-resolved retrospective measures of subjective experience (Temporal Experience Tracing). Both doses of DMT induced rapid changes in experience dimensions. However, the 40mg dose induced significantly more extreme visual hallucinations and emotionally intense experiences. Further, we computed a variety of neural markers on the EEG data, and found that oscillatory alpha power and permutation entropy were most strongly associated with continuous subjective experience dimensions. Strikingly, lempel-ziv complexity, a previously hailed as a robust correlate of subjective experiences within the psychedelic-state, was the least

strongly associated neural marker. These findings provide an important insight into how distinct neural dynamics may contribute to this radical and intense altered state of consciousness.

5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) is a psychedelic drug known for its uniquely profound effects on subjective experience, reliably eradicating the perception of time, space, and the self. However, little is known about how this drug alters large-scale brain activity. We collected naturalistic electroencephalography (EEG) data of 29 healthy individuals before and after inhaling a high dose (12mg) of vaporised synthetic 5-MeO-DMT. We replicate work from rodents showing amplified low-frequency oscillations, but extend these findings with novel tools for characterising the organisation and dynamics of complex low-frequency spatiotemporal fields of neural activity. We find that 5-MeO-DMT radically reorganises low-frequency flows of neural activity, causing them to become incoherent, heterogeneous, viscous, fleeting, nonrecurring, and to cease their typical travelling forwards and backwards across the cortex compared to resting state. Further, we find a consequence of this reorganisation in broadband activity, which exhibits slower, more stable, low-dimensional behaviour, with increased energy barriers to rapid global shifts. These findings provide the first detailed empirical account of how 5-MeO-DMT sculpts human brain dynamics, revealing a novel set of cortical slow wave behaviours, with significant implications for extant neuroscientific models of serotonergic psychedelics.

Understanding the neural substrate of altered conscious states is an important cultural, scientific, and clinical endeavour. Although hypnosis causes strong shifts in conscious perception and cognition, it remains largely unclear how hypnosis affects information processing in cortical networks. Here we manipulated the depth of hypnotic states to study information processing between cortical regions involved in attention and awareness. We used high-density Electroencephalography (EEG) to record resting-state cortical activity from 30 hypnosis experts during two hypnotic states with different depth. Each participant entered a light and a deep hypnotic state as well as two well-matched control states. Bridging top-down and lateralisation models of hypnosis, we found that interhemispheric frontoparietal connectivity distinguished hypnosis and control conditions, while no difference was found between the two hypnotic states. Using a graph-theoretic measure, we revealed that the amount of information passing through individual nodes (measured via betweenness centrality) is reduced during hypnosis relative to control states. Finally, we found that theta power was enhanced during hypnosis. Our result contributes to the current discussion around a role for theta power in bringing about hypnotic states, as well as other altered conscious states. Overall, our findings support the notion that altered top-down control in frontoparietal regions facilitates hypnosis by integrating information between cortical hemispheres.

Our world is full of beings and the space of possible minds is vast. An individual mind has experiences. The structure of such experiences gives rise to particular states. Individuals find themselves at a particular location on the landscape of such states. Regions that are often traversed in normal life are only a spectrum of the possible conscious states that exist.

This presentation explores how we might systematically map the inner world to better navigate and expand our range of possible experiences. Different avenues of approach—meditation, psychopharmacology, and brain-machine-interfaces—can be used to explore the landscape. Each method produces examples of novel states of consciousness, helping us to build a map while simultaneously being tools to navigate it.

We can see conscious experiences as belonging to a universal set, where individuals and species each inhabit distinct subsets. A set-theoretic approach provides a formal model, where experiences are elements within larger sets of possible and lived experiences. It provides a useful framework for analysing the diversity in experiences, states, and minds that exist.

By utilising mathematical concepts, we refine our understanding of how consciousness can be structured, compared, and intentionally modified. The development of a Lexicon of Being, cataloging known and yet-to-be-discovered states, provides a means for democratising access to the varieties of consciousness.

Building maps of the inner landscape allows us to move toward a future where individuals can explore, understand, and engineer their own mental states with greater precision and intention.

The democratization of deep meditative states through neurofeedback technology represents a promising frontier in contemplative science, yet its development has been hindered by the absence of personalized, objective markers tracking real-time meditation depth. Here, we present heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs) as a dynamic index of meditative states, examining how neural responses to cardiac events reflect moment-to-moment shifts in phenomenological experience. We focused on Vipassana meditation—a practice defined by systematic cultivation of non-judgmental bodily awareness—as it offers a direct window into enhancing interoceptive sensibility, a faculty notably disrupted across mental health conditions that show robust improvements with meditation. Expert practitioners (n=30) underwent two 90-minute sessions separated by a minimum of one week, during which they employed a novel "spontaneous emergence" method to collect real-time measures of meditative depth while recording 64-channel EEG and ECG. Capitalizing on meditation's inherent silence, we utilized the R-peak of the ECG signal as a temporal marker to examine neural responses to these endogenous events across varying meditative depths. Our analyses revealed that HEP amplitude at electrode C3 exhibited remarkable sensitivity in distinguishing five levels of self-reported meditation depth (p<0.0001, η²=5.55), with deeper states permitting cardiac events to hold increased causal power over neural activity. The clinical relevance of these markers was further supported by HEP modulation range predicting post-session improvements in mood and decentering (both p<0.0001). This work introduces a framework for developing personalized neurofeedback protocols to facilitate meditative states, with implications for both basic research in contemplative neuroscience and clinical applications of mindfulness-based interventions.

The Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique is a simple, effortless, standardized procedure practiced for 20 min twice daily while sitting comfortably with eyes closed. TM practice enables the mind to settle down effortlessly and spontaneously to experience more refined, quiet states of the thinking process until one transcends thinking to experience the source of thought (i.e. pure awareness). Electroencephalography (EEG) studies have shown that as practitioners report quieter, more peaceful experiences, brain functional connectivity exhibits higher alpha coherence in frontal and posterior electrodes. It is an open question to what extent functional connectivity metrics that capture nonlinear interactions are modulated during TM. Here, using EEG recordings and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification from 38 long-term meditators (mean age = 40.3 yo; 23 males; mean years of practice = 12.9) and 38 controls (non-meditators) matched by age and gender, we evaluated connectivity metrics tracking distinct large-scale neural interactions: weighted symbolic mutual information (WSMI), capturing nonlinear interactions; and weighted phase-lag index (WPLI), capturing linear interactions. WSMI and WPLI were computed during baseline periods (10 mins before and after TM) and TM period (30 mins). Interestingly, our preliminary results demonstrate that TM and baseline periods in practitioners are better decoded by WSMI than WPLI across several canonical frequency bands, showing a sharp decrease in WSMI during TM compared to baseline. Our results reveal distinct neural dynamics during TM, offering insights into refined conscious states and highlighting the value of nonlinear approaches to studying meditation.

Recent findings suggest that Emergent Phenomena (EP)—unusual mental or somatic states often labeled as spiritual, mystical, energetic, psychedelic, or magical (Sandilands & Ingram, 2024)—are far more prevalent than previously assumed. Wright et al. (2024) reported that 45% of a general population sample experienced at least one non-pharmacologically induced EP. While some individuals report transformative growth from these profound experiences, others face significant distress. As consciousness altering practices and “non-ordinary” states (e.g., meditation, psychedelics) become increasingly common in Western contexts, there is a pressing need to refine diagnostic and treatment approaches that account for both potential risks and benefits. Limited clinical recognition of EP contributes to their being overlooked or mistakenly pathologized, which may result in suboptimal treatment.

To address this gap, Emergent Phenomena Research Consortium launched the Expert Opinion Project. In the first phase, a three-round Delphi study, we are engaging researchers and clinicians with expertise in both clinical/medical and contemplative domains to identify key assessment criteria, treatment strategies, and systemic barriers to effective care of EP. This work aims to develop consensus guidelines for recognizing and supporting EP in clinical contexts. Future phases will expand participation to include cultural leaders, integration specialists, and individuals with lived experience, ensuring guidelines balance clinical rigor with cultural sensitivity and practical utility.

We propose that physiological childbirth, particularly in unmedicated contexts, represents a spontaneous altered state of consciousness. Our theoretical framework asserts that the hormonal cascades and intense somatic engagement during natural labour produce transient modifications in perception, affect, and self-awareness that overlap with those experience during recognised altered states. This model builds on previous case observations that document measurable shifts in experiential dimensions during childbirth.

We conducted a large-scale survey of over 10,000 participants drawn from the Great British Intelligence Test cohort to evaluate this framework empirically. The survey on-goingly collects retrospective self-reports of childbirth experiences using validated measures to assess temporal perception, sensory modulation, and affective response. We then apply factor analysis and multivariate regression to systematically map the phenomenological dimensions and identify latent constructs associated with altered states of consciousness, then relate them to childbirth experiences.

This investigation refines conceptual models of spontaneous altered states and holds implications for both theoretical understanding and clinical practice in obstetric care, but also for the science of consciousness. Detailed results and further analyses will be presented to stimulate discussion on the integration of neurobiological and phenomenological perspectives related to childbirth in the study of consciousness.

We are entering a third wave of meditation research focused on advanced meditation, including states and stages of meditation practice that unfold with time and mastery. Nirodha samapatti (NS), sometimes called extended cessation in the scientific literature, is a meditative endpoint described in Theravada Buddhist meditation that corresponds to complete cessation of perception and feeling. In other words, meditators report periods of unconsciousness during NS. Here, we aimed to determine the neural correlates of NS, including their relation to biomarkers of unconsciousness. For example, EEG-based Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZc) has been shown to consistently decrease during anesthesia and disorders of consciousness. Using the first-ever EEG and MEG data from NS meditators, we measured differences in whole-brain, source localized, normalized, broadband LZc between NS and two non-meditative, cognitively engaging control tasks. No significant differences in normalized, broadband LZc were identified between NS and the control tasks. These results suggest that NS is a unique brain state from other interventions and conditions that lead to unconsciousness. In the future, we intend to analyze frequency-resolved LZc, as well as other neural correlates of consciousness, including hierarchical brain function and information integration.

Introduction:

Virtual Reality Hypnosis (VRH), combining virtual reality (VR) and hypnosis, is a promising tool for alleviating pain and anxiety by fostering dissociation and absorption. Proponents of VRH hypothesize that VR enhances the hypnotic experience for people with a low hypnotic suggestibility (HS). While HS influences hypnotic effectiveness, it remains unclear whether VRH benefits low HS individuals. This study investigates whether VRH enhances hypnosis for individuals with low HS using the Elkins Hypnotizability Scale1.

Methods:

Sixty-six participants (41±14 years; 38 women) underwent two randomized conditions: VRH (Aqua©, Sedakit HypnoVR, underwater whale-following simulation) and traditional hypnosis (prerecorded audio with black cross fixation in the VR headset). HS was assessed beforehand, and participants were categorized as low, medium or high (scores: 0–3, 4–7, 8–12 respectively). After each condition, dissociation, absorption, and anxiety were rated using numerical scales (0–10), and time perception was evaluated with open-ended responses. A repeated measures ANOVA examined effects of group (low, medium, high), condition (VRH, traditional hypnosis), and their interaction.

Results:

Among participants, 29 had low, 21 medium, and 16 high HS. No significant differences were found across groups, conditions, or their interaction for any measured variable.

Conclusion:

Findings do not support the hypothesis that VR enhances hypnosis for low HS individuals. Nor it does for high and medium HS participants. These results are critical given the growing use of VRH in clinical settings. Further research is necessary to refine this innovative tool and better understand its clinical potential.

1. Kekecs Z., et al. IntJClinExpHypn. 2016.

Embodied self-specific processing is linked to both mortality awareness and Buddhist-inspired meditation practices. Human predictive capacity underlies its adaptive strength but also the potential for existential terror. Grounded in the predictive processing framework of brain function, we recently showed using a magnetoencephalogram visual mismatch-response (vMMR) paradigm that prediction-based self-specific neural mechanisms shield the self from existential threat–at the level of perception–by attributing death to the ‘other’ (non-self). Given the mechanistic role of self-other distinction in death-denial, and the Buddhist soteriological aim of its dissolution, we tested whether meditation practice was associated with a reduction in the brain’s defensiveness towards mortality. Thirty-eight meditators pooled from a previous project investigating self-boundary dissolution neurophenomenology underwent the vMMR task. The pre-registered results indicated vMMR responses to the coupling of death and self-stimuli in a manner indicating acceptance rather than denial, corresponding to increased self-reported well-being. Furthermore, death acceptance degree was associated with the phenomenological affective valence dimension (blissful to terrible), but not dissolution depth dimensions (degree of agency/1st-person perspective/attentional disposition), or previous meditative experience. These findings support the hypothesis that deeply seated defenses underlying the human tendency to avoid death are amenable to mental training. Furthermore, the results underscore, in line with other studies, the importance of affective valence during meditation, in particularly in non-dual awareness practices (as well as psychedelic interventions) which can induce radical disruptions to self-consciousness.

This review integrates anthropological and neuroscientific perspectives to elucidate music-induced trance processes and their implications for non-ordinary states of consciousness (NSCs), with a focus on unifying psychobiological frameworks. The objectives are to deepen the understanding of trance phenomena, delineate links between various trance expressions, and identify gaps to guide future neuroscientific research. Drawing on anthropological insights, we examine trance processes focusing on their phenomenology, benefits, and the central role of music in their expression. Examples such as shamanism in non-Western cultures and rave parties in Western societies reveal shared cultural narratives and universal features and functions of music—such as rhythmic structuring and synchronization during rituals and entertainment events—that facilitate trance states by guiding their induction and maintenance. On the neuroscientific front, we review studies employing imaging techniques to map brain activity and connectivity during music-induced trance states. Findings reveal shared neurophysiological mechanisms across NSCs, including shifts in neural activity from executive networks to limbic and default mode networks, as well as heightened synchronization in low-frequency brainwaves—particularly delta and theta bands. These neural signatures underline the dynamic interplay between cognitive, emotional, and sensory systems during trance, providing insights into its universal neural basis. Our interdisciplinary synthesis highlights the universality of trance phenomena and underscores their cultural and biological roots. Future research should examine individual suggestibility and the therapeutic potential of music-induced trance in modern clinical applications.

While the beneficial impacts of meditation are increasingly acknowledged, its underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we employed magnetoencephalography (MEG) to assess changes in brain dynamics in expert Buddhist monks during resting state (RS), and two established meditation methods known as Samatha and Vipassana, which employ focused attention and open monitoring techniques. We leveraged the high spatio-temporal resolution of MEG to compute a wide range of features with a focus on neural complexity and criticality metrics. More specifically, the study assessed spectral power density (PSD) in multiple frequency bands, the 1/f exponent, the long-range temporal correlations (LRTC) on oscillatory envelopes via Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA), Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZc), Spectral Entropy (SpecEn), Higuchi's fractal dimension (HFD) and the distance to criticality coefficient (DCC).

Our findings indicate increased levels of neural signal complexity during both meditation practices compared to the resting state, alongside widespread reductions in gamma-band LRTC and 1/f slope. In addition, a feature importance analysis based on a Random Forest classifier, revealed that the features with the highest discriminative power between the meditative states and resting-state were the DFA exponent. Importantly, the DCC analysis revealed a separation between Samatha and Vipassana, suggesting that their distinct phenomenological properties are mediated by specific computational characteristics of their dynamic states. Overall, these results suggest that different meditation techniques engage unique neural circuits and processes, enhancing our understanding of how meditation affects brain function through the lens of complexity and critical dynamics.

In the wake of the active inference framework, two popular theories of consciousness highlight the relevance of insular cortex for interoceptive self-modeling (Fermin et al., 2022; Seth, 2021) and subcortical brain regions for qualitative experience (Solms, 2021). Both provide a compelling ecological argument for integrated conscious experience, i.e., self-organization of complex organisms with optimization goals that are usually parallel, multifaceted, and hard to reconcile. Computationally, both theories require some kind of self-model as basis, which could contradict credible reports of minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) (Metzinger, 2024) that argues for conscious states without an experience of selfhood. However, duality of conscious experience could be explained by a neuroscientific theory of two distinct brain networks emerging from different neurodevelopmental pathways, leading to marked differences in cytoarchitecture and function (Luu et al., 2024; Sanides, 1962). System-A, originating from an olfactory system and amygdala-centered expansion gradient towards ventral cortex, could enable interoceptive self-modeling for habitual interactions with the body and the world. System-H, hippocampus-centered towards dorsal cortex, could enable less egocentric forms of cognition and experience. In this sense, MPE could be a less salient/habitual form of experience, when neither interoceptive/exteroceptive prediction errors nor spontaneous episodic memory reactivation provide self-referential engagement of System-A. System-H, if not operating on content, could give rise to self-less experience of the world as such.

Computational theories of affective valence employing the active inference framework link valence to uncertainty reduction and subjective fitness. However, such a view cannot easily account for the conscious phenomenology of deep meditative experience, where valence is modulated by the degree of contraction, tensing or constriction present in subjective experience. I examine tensions between these two perspectives, aiming for an integrated active inference account of valence.

Drawing on work on meditative deconstruction, cognitive effort and traditional Buddhist perspectives, I argue that while valence is superficially tied to allostasis (the process of achieving stability through change), this relationship is mutable via the release of contraction during deconstruction. Synthesizing meditative and uncertainty-reduction perspectives, I show how the release of contraction results in more positive valence, irrespective of subjective fitness, and correlates with decreased hierarchical depth and complexity of an agent’s generative model of the world.

This more comprehensive computational understanding of valence has important implications for the design of interventions targeting the reduction of suffering and improved well-being.

Mindfulness practice has been associated with numerous cognitive benefits, yet its specific impact on automatic mental processes remains understudied. This research investigates how focused attention (FA) mindfulness influences automatic semantic processing through a series of modified Stroop tasks. In a between-groups design, participants were randomly assigned to either brief FA meditation or mind-wandering control conditions. Results demonstrated that FA meditation significantly reduced Stroop congruency facilitation effects specifically in the classic color-word task, but not in control tasks involving non-semantic visual features. This selective reduction suggests that FA meditation temporarily inhibits automatic semantic processing rather than enhancing general attentional control or proactive maintenance. Notably, these effects emerged in meditation novices following brief (10-minute) guided FA sessions with 2-minute maintenance periods, indicating that even short-term mindfulness practice can modulate automatic cognitive processes. These findings provide empirical support for mindfulness' role in reducing automatic thought processes and contribute to our understanding of its underlying cognitive mechanisms. The study offers insights into how brief mindfulness interventions might help individuals better manage intrusive thoughts and automatic cognitive processes in daily life.

Background

The modulation of the sense of self is a central part in many contemplative traditions. It has been described phenomenologically as involving a profound alteration of the distinctions of self and world, which has been termed as ‘self-boundary dissolution’. We used neurofeedback to explore (A) the neurophenomenology of self-boundary dissolution by creating a closed loop between brain activity and phenomenology, and (B) how neurofeedback can support this state.

Methods

We provided experienced meditators (n=18) with real-time 64-channel EEG auditory neurofeedback of source localized brain activity. Each subject completed three feedback conditions: Lempel-Ziv complexity in the posterior medial cortex, theta oscillatory power in the occipital cortex, and a sham feedback. In the first part, participants were blinded to which signal direction corresponded to a deeper self-boundary dissolution, and the direction was randomly flipped across 7 repeated trials. Participants were asked to identify the direction by comparing their meditation experience to the feedback signal. We predict identification of the correct direction with above-chance accuracy. In the second part, participants were asked to regulate the feedback in the direction which corresponded to self-boundary dissolution. We predict that the feedback in the experimental conditions would support the dissolution more than in the sham condition. Phenomenological interviews were conducted after each part to explore participants’ experience and strategies.

Results

Data collection is ongoing and will be completed in April. In a pilot study, participants recognized the signal direction with significantly above-chance accuracy and were able to regulate the signal in both experimental conditions.

Hypnosis is a state of “focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness characterized by an enhanced capacity for response to suggestion” (Elkins et al., 2015). Hypnotic verbal suggestions effectively alter phenomenological experiences, including pain. However, how the brain encodes hypnotic verbal suggestions to change pain perception remains unclear.

We recorded fMRI data from 23 participants exposed to four types of hypnotic verbal suggestions: hyperalgesia, analgesia, and two matched neutral conditions. After each suggestion (~2 min.), cutaneous electric stimulations were administered, and subjective pain ratings were collected. Leveraging the time-locked nature of this paradigm, we applied intersubject correlation (ISC) analysis to assess shared neural fluctuations during suggestions. Hypnosis-relevant traits (e.g., hypnotic susceptibility) and pain modulation were examined as between-person factors.

Pain ratings confirmed the expected modulatory effects of suggestions (Hyper > Neutral: t(22) = 3.43, p = .003; Analgesia > Neutral: t(22) = -2.48, p = .02). Significant ISC was observed for pain modulation conditions (combined hyperalgesia and analgesia) in regions associated with language comprehension and multimodal processing (peak r = 0.14, FDR < .05). The analgesia condition induced greater ISC than hyperalgesia in the superior and middle temporal gyri (peak r difference = 0.13, FDR < .05), with synchrony increasing alongside hypnotic susceptibility.

This study is the first to investigate hypnotic suggestion encoding for pain modulation using a model-free approach. Our findings suggest that hypnotic analgesia engages more consistent neural dynamics across individuals than hyperalgesia, highlighting how linguistic content structures conscious pain experiences and offering insights into the neural encoding of suggestion-driven modulation.

We present a neurophenomenological case study investigating distinct neural connectivity regimes during an advanced concentrative absorption meditation called jhana (ACAM-J), characterized by highly-stable attention and mental absorption. Using EEG recordings and phenomenological ratings (29 sessions) from a meditator with +20,000 hours of practice, we evaluated connectivity metrics tracking distinct large-scale neural interactions: nonlinear (WSMI and Directed Information), capturing non-oscillatory dynamics; and linear (WPLI) connectivity metrics, capturing oscillatory synchrony. Results demonstrate ACAM-J is better distinguished by non-oscillatory compared to oscillatory dynamics across multiple frequency ranges. Furthermore, combining attention-related phenomenological ratings with WSMI improves Bayesian decoding of ACAM-J compared to neural metrics alone. Crucially, deeper ACAM-J indicate an equalization of feedback and feedforward processes, suggesting a balance of internally and externally-driven information processing. Our results reveal distinct neural dynamics during ACAM-J, offering insights into refined conscious states and highlighting the value of nonlinear neurophenomenological approaches to studying attentional states.

Meditation has been shown to induce states of consciousness that are free from various forms of suffering, such as physical pain and mental anxiety. However, its broad effectiveness raises the question: what kind of suffering or well-being does meditation actually address? We explore this question systematically, proposing that meditation's effectiveness stems not from addressing specific forms of suffering but from dismantling the underlying mechanisms that create the conditions for suffering to arise in the first place.

In the talk, first, I will frame the notion of suffering from three frameworks: well-being (hedonia/eudaimonia), contemporary mindfulness, and traditional Buddhist practice. While these approaches may lead to phenomenologically similar states free from suffering, they reinforce different mental tendencies, thereby affecting how conscious experience unfolds over time. Second, I will highlight this difference using the action-perception cycle as the analytical tool. Particularly, I will contrast the “presence” of suffering and its “perpetuation” (probability of suffering arising). Third, I will propose four stages through which meditation reduces perpetuation by progressively revealing that suffering, typically perceived as a passive experience, is in fact a specific pattern of action we are engaged in (i.e., enacted).

Our framework provides precise conceptual tools to computationally model how meditation alters the action-perception cycle, making it possible to formalize traditionally subjective concepts like non-reactivity, ignorance, and suffering. This has significant implications for both clinical applications and consciousness research.

Historically, clinicians and psychologists of religion have sought to distinguish spiritual from psychopathological experiences under the heading of ‘differential diagnosis.’ While distress and impairment are often proposed as criteria for pathological interpretations, recently researchers have begun to document how some distressing and impairing meditation-related experiences are appraised as normative within contemporary contemplative traditions. In light of this, how can clinicians striving to be culturally sensitive make sense of these meditation-related difficulties without doing harm? What kind of etic frameworks can explain how sometimes things get worse before they get better, whereas other times things get worse before deteriorating further? And how might we begin to understand some of the causal factors that result in one trajectory over the other? This talk will explore these questions in relation to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic contemplative traditions and will seek to address them based on novel approaches to cognitive and clinical science.

Recent research in meditation science has expanded beyond the therapeutic applications of Buddhist and other Asian contemplative practices to explore advanced meditative states, including energy-like somatic experiences (ELSEs). While ELSEs have been studied in Buddhist and Yogic contexts, little is known about their occurrence in contemporary Jewish, Christian, and Islamic meditative traditions. This study investigated ELSEs through qualitative interviews with over 60 practitioners and meditation teachers from Abrahamic traditions in the West. It found a range of co-occuring phenomenology across somatic, affective, and perceptual domains as well as a range of religious and scientific interpretions of them. While there were many similarities with ELSEs documented in western Buddhist traditions in terms of the phenomenological features and the appraisals used to make sense of such experiences, there were also notable differences in both domains. Taken together, this study highlights the interplay of phenomenology, physiology, cultural context, and meaning-making in the generation and shaping of non-ordinary meditative states of consciousness.

Meditation practices are often engaged with an altered sense of self. Self-compassion, for example, relies on processes like perspective-taking and imagining empathetic actions toward oneself to alleviate suffering. It is unclear whether and how self-identification, based on multisensory own-body signals, can contribute to self-compassion meditation. We thus designed a self-compassion meditation practice in virtual reality (VR) that integrates a multisensory stimulation that promotes self-identification for a 3D avatar in an audio-guided meditation. Participants carried out this VR-based avatar self-compassion condition (ASC), which was compared with a standard self-compassion condition (SSC). Pre- and post-meditation assessments include scores of the State Self-Compassion Scale (S-SCS), Self-Other Four Immeasurables (SOFI) Scale, and an Own Body Transformation (OBT) task to measure perspective-taking ability. Participants demonstrated significantly higher compassion ratings compared to baseline measures, exhibiting higher S-SCS scores, increased positive qualities on the SOFI scale, and reduced negative valence in both meditation conditions. Perspective-taking ability, measured in the OBT task, was more strongly facilitated in the ASC. This study shows that integrating VR and an avatar with multisensory stimulation into self-compassion practice (ASC) is feasible, with both ASC and SSC meditations improved self-compassion ratings comparable to the baseline, and that ASC meditation enhances perspective-taking more than SSC. We argue that multisensory perceptual processes in VR can support self-related processes of perspective-taking and empathy when cultivating self-compassion.

Across cultures and times, people report experiences of contact with religious, spiritual, or other special beings. While spirits or gods could be understood as products of human narrativity, recent research based on neurocomputational predictive processing theory shows that feelings of presence (FoP) of special beings can be experimentally induced in the lab. However, what specific factors are influencing such subjectively real experiences?

In designing this registered report, we plan to test the following factors: sensory uncertainty (i.e., sensory deprivation), cultural learning (Catholic Christianity, providing prior expectations potentially overriding the actual sensory experience), and suggestive stimulus (“God helmet” - a sham device allegedly inducing FoPs by manipulating brain’s electromagnetic field). We plan to sample 119 participants for a medium effect size (f2 = 0.15). We will use a within-subject experimental design for manipulating sensory deprivation under the stable God helmet condition; participants will be recruited from three different populations - formally religious, religious with practice unrelated to feelings of presence, and religious practising specifically sensed presence feelings.

We expect that under a sham God helmet: participants trained in religious FoP practices will experience more FoPs; participants will experience more FoPs under sensory deprivation than without (incl. interaction with religious practice); participants trained in FoP-oriented practice will report more intense FoPs.

Examining the effects of uncertainty, cultural learning, and suggestive context on differences in subjective sensory experience can impact disciplines across fields - from neurology and psychology to human ethology. Thus, we would be happy to hear comments on and critiques of our design.

While we intuitively trust our senses to reflect reality, experiences like illusions and hallucinations show perception isn’t necessarily tied to the external world. This disconnect highlights the need for a metacognitive Sense of Reality (SoR) mechanism that continuously evaluates whether our perceptual experiences accurately reflect the world around us. While SoR is essential for navigating the world, the lack of ecologically valid paradigms has left its electrophysiological mechanisms largely unknown.

Here, we developed a novel, highly realistic VR-EEG paradigm to investigate this mechanism by presenting virtual hallucinations - designed to evoke a feeling of strangeness - across three domains: Self (height changes), Laws of Nature (gravity alterations), and Perception (color shifts). Twenty-three participants first performed a 2AFC staircase procedure to determine individual psychophysical thresholds for seven parametrically controlled hallucination conditions. Importantly, a baseline condition with a realistic change was included to dissociate SoR from mere change detection. During a subsequent EEG study, participants provided subjective “realness” ratings for the virtual hallucination and realistic conditions and identified the objective manipulation category.

Preliminary findings demonstrated that participants rated virtual hallucinations as significantly less real than realistic changes. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) using linear discriminant classification revealed distinct spatiotemporal patterns that allowed successful decoding of trials with virtual hallucinations from realistic trials, starting ~350ms post-manipulation, across all domains.

These initial findings offer new insight into the electrophysiological markers of SoR and validate a novel VR-EEG method for its study. Ongoing work includes MVPA of subjective 'realness’, pupillometry, and a replication study.

Understanding how individuals subjectively experience the world is crucial for mental health research, yet the best means to elicit meaningful responses remains elusive. Here, we introduce a computational approach to map and compare subjective reports in the embedding space of Large Language Models. We use this method to examine how subjective reports of a series of visual stimuli relate to transdiagnostic psychiatric symptom dimensions (Wise et al., 2023). More specifically, we compare the predictions from 3 different sets of stimuli: the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and the Rorschach Inkblot Test (RIT) using verbal responses from 210 participants to 30 visual stimuli. Embedded reports to IAPS images significantly predicted compulsive behaviors and intrusive thoughts (AUC = .83, p = .0024, corr.) and TAT images best classified mood and impulsivity symptoms (AUC = .84, p = .0017, corr.). Interestingly, RIT reports did not lead to any significant prediction, possibly due to excessive individual alignment with group trends, as indexed by a higher ratio of inter-to-intra-individual variability across images (cosine similarity, ANOVA F(2,207) = 3560.1, Rorschach > IAPS > TAT, all p < 0.001, corr.). Our results align with and extend recent findings that natural language descriptions of mental states strongly correlate with psychometric scales (Kjell et al., 2021). Thus, leveraging more predictive report elicitation methods could ultimately help identify new therapeutic targets for clinical interventions. In sum, adopting a computational psychiatric perspective, we presented methods to reveal the representational trends and distortions that color subjective experience and influence mental health.

Hallucinations are commonly understood as purely ‘inner’ phenomena arising from cortical misfirings that simulate perception without external stimuli. Challenging this neurocentric, perception-based model, I propose an 'embodied imagination' model, integrating an imagination-based account of hallucination with an embodied approach to imagination.

I argue that hallucination is a form of involuntary sensory imagination, akin to earworms, shaped by bodily and environmental structures, not just neural activity. This builds on enactivist accounts of imagination as a participatory, embodied activity (e.g., pretend play, tool-making) (Gallagher, 2017).

The imagination-based view treats hallucinations as degenerate imagination requiring the absence of external objects (Allen, 2015). However, this view struggles with ‘veridical hallucinations’, where one hallucinates something that happens to be present, and explaining how absent entities shape hallucinatory phenomenology.

The embodied imagination view model resolves these issues by emphasizing a bodily constraint on attention – one cannot simultaneously 'attend' to an imagined object and a perceived object in the same location (Sartre, 1940/2010) – and showing that hallucinations are shaped by imaginative engagement with environmental affordances, not merely the absence of stimuli.

This model applies both real and hypothetical cases. In schizophrenia, it aligns with phenomenological psychopathology, viewing hallucinations as ‘localized’ symptoms of ‘global’ disruptions in the experiential structure. Concerning hypothetical, 'subjectively indistinguishable' hallucinations, it challenges the idea that brain states alone suffice to generate hallucinations, arguing that the absence of external objects is also necessary.

By situating hallucination within embodied cognition, this model offers a compelling alternative to internalist views, reshaping broader debates on the perception-imagination distinction.

Introduction

Altered states of consciousness (ASC) feature complex interactions between low-level perceptual changes and global-level alterations (e.g., in sense of self and temporality). The role of sensory alterations – such as psychedelic visual hallucinations – in driving broader ASC-specific effects remains unclear. While the impact of unusual sensory conditions on consciousness has been studied using intense-rhythmic (stroboscopic) or unstructured (Ganzfeld) visual stimulation, less is known about more complex stimuli. Here we examine how machine-learning simulated hallucinations – in the form of the Deep-Dream VR platform – affect subjective experience and peripheral physiology.

Methods

In a series of exploratory studies, we manipulate presentation mode (stereoscopic vs. monoscopic; Pre-study), type and strength of Deep-Dream hallucinations (Study 1), comparing them against non-psychedelic Style-Transfer alterations (Study 2), and contrasting passive exposure with gaze-contingent hallucination propagation (Study 3). As primary outcome, we assess ASC-specific alterations using a novel questionnaire (excluding sensory-related items), complemented by free reports and measurements of cardiac activity, eye movements, and pupillometry.

Results

Pre-study data (n = 14) indicated greater ASC-specific alterations during simulated hallucinations compared to normal (unaltered) videos, with a trend towards enhanced effectiveness of stereoscopic versus previously used monoscopic hallucinations. The analyses from ongoing studies will compare questionnaire responses, thematically analyzed free reports, and physiological measures across parametrically varied conditions, relating response patterns to established markers of psychedelic states.

Conclusion

The Deep-Dream VR platform constitutes a powerful tool for studying sensory-driven alterations in consciousness, developed here for enhanced immersiveness, parametric diversity of simulated hallucinations, and real-time dependence on gaze dynamics.

The ability to distinguish real from unreal experiences, known as the Sense of Reality (SoR), is a core feature of normal perception and cognition. Crucially its disruption is a defining symptom of psychiatric disorders such as psychosis and derealization-depersonalization syndrome. Recent work using virtual hallucinations in immersive VR has demonstrated evidence that SoR judgments vary systematically with both the domain and magnitude of perceptual alterations, suggesting a neural mechanism monitoring perception for veridicality. Here, we present an fMRI-adapted paradigm designed to investigate the neural basis of SoR across multiple perceptual domains and to identify cortical regions implicated in perceptual reality monitoring. Fifteen participants completed a psychophysically controlled task while viewing a realistic virtual environment, first establishing individual perceptual thresholds for seven alteration conditions. These conditions, inspired by symptoms of altered perception from psychiatric and psychedelic states, represented three domains of altered perception and a veridical baseline condition: Nature (changes in gravity), Self (changes in first person perspective), and Perception (changes in color). Subsequently, stimuli were presented in the scanner in random order at different magnitudes based on the estimated psychophysical thresholds, while participants provided realness judgments under immersive conditions. Based on previous findings, we hypothesized differential engagement of sensory, association, and prefrontal areas and searched for domain-specific neural patterns. Detection of such mechanisms may advance our understanding of SoR and its relevance to both neurotypical perception and clinical disorders.

Hallucinations can be understood as resulting from alterations in the neural processes that construct conscious experiences out of sensory input. Research into conscious perception could therefore benefit from more refined means of characterising the phenomenology of hallucinations. Here, we introduce and validate the 6-Dimensional Visual Hallucination Questionnaire (6D-VHQ) to measure how the perceptual contents of visual hallucinations may vary across different hallucinatory experiences. While previously validated questionnaires on visual hallucinations are used within research on altered states of consciousness and mental health, these primarily assess whether certain types of hallucinations co-occur with other non-hallucinatory experiences such as ego dissolution or delusions. In contrast, the 6D-VHQ focuses specifically on the contents of visual hallucinations, capturing key attributes including vividness, level of detail, and complexity. We present results showing that the 6D-VHQ has high internal validity when applied to hallucinations induced by stroboscopic light, and high face validity when used with control image stimuli. Additionally, when used in the context of stroboscopic light, the 6D-VHQ reveals how changes in stroboscopic frequency influences the reported contents of hallucinations. Altogether, the 6D-VHQ provides a new method for assessing the perceptual contents of visual hallucinations. It provides researchers investigating visual hallucinations, altered states of consciousness, and phenomenology with a robust tool that can be applied across diverse hallucinatory contexts and aetiologies.

Hallucinations are a common non-motor symptom in Parkinson’s disease (PD). They range from minor, including passage and presence hallucinations and visual illusions, to well-structured hallucinations such as visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations, and are linked to a more rapid cognitive decline (Bejr‐Kasem et al., 2021, Anang et al., 2014). To enable the study of hallucinations in controlled laboratory settings, our group has developed a robotic system that, via sensorimotor conflict, induces presence hallucinations-like symptoms, or in other words the sensation of someone being nearby (Blanke et al., 2014). Notably, PD patients who experience hallucinations as one of their symptoms exhibit heightened sensitivity to this sensorimotor conflict (Bernasconi et al., 2021). Our current study integrates the behavioural data from the robot experiment with neuropsychological assessments and resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), to investigate neural correlates of cognitive impairment in PD patients with symptomatic hallucinations. Our dataset includes a total of 53 patients categorised into three groups: no hallucinations (n = 19), minor hallucinations (n = 18), and a combination of minor and well-structured hallucinations (n = 16). Our preliminary analysis employing partial least square correlation suggests that mainly the functional connectivity between subcortical areas and the visual network is associated with both the sensitivity to the robot task and frontal subcortical scores of the PD - Cognitive Rating Scale in the three groups of PD patients. Ongoing analyses will further explore this relationship to advance our understanding of neural mechanisms underlying cognitive decline in PD patients with symptomatic hallucinations.

According to the Bayesian predictive processing framework, conscious perception arises from the brain’s probabilistic integration of sensory evidence (likelihood) and prior knowledge (priors). This process relies on dynamically weighting these inputs to predict and update perceptions in response to prediction errors. Aberrant weighting of priors has been linked to hallucinations, a key symptom of psychotic disorders. However, there is conflicting evidence regarding the question whether hallucinations result from abnormally weak or strong priors. A hierarchical model posits that weak priors at lower levels of the predictive processing hierarchy may be compensated by stronger priors at higher levels, but empirical validation is lacking. In a large online study, we test this hierarchical model using two perceptual decision-making experiments in healthy participants with varying hallucination proneness. In the first experiment, participants perform a noisy-image discrimination task, designed to assess reliance on low-level priors by measuring choice-history biases. We hypothesize reduced choice-history biases in individuals with higher hallucination proneness, reflecting weak low-level priors. The second experiment probes the influence of high-level priors by measuring the effect of learning on the recognition performance for degraded images. We predict enhanced recognition performance for degraded stimuli after learning in individuals with higher hallucination proneness, indicating greater reliance on high-level priors. Importantly, we expect an inverse correlation between both effects across individuals. Preliminary results of this study will be presented. This research aims to reconcile opposing findings on prior weighting in hallucinations and will crucially refine mechanistic models of conscious perception in psychosis.

We effortlessly assign meaning to what we see and experience, yet understanding how meaning becomes distorted by mental health conditions remains a significant challenge. Brain imaging studies reveal that meaning is organized within a complex semantic “map” that tiles the cerebral cortex. Encoding models based on deep learning (DL) embeddings (such as CLIP) can model “generic” semantic information based on the visual properties of images and could potentially capture how an individual’s interpretation departs from what is expected. For instance, individuals with strong delusional tendencies may attribute false meanings to everyday situations, which may be revealed by decreased modeling performance in relevant brain regions.This project examines how delusion severity impacts DL models' ability to predict neural activity in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Using data from the PRISME database, we analyzed functional MRI (fMRI) recordings from 13 participants with a history of psychosis. Each participant underwent 10–12 scanning sessions over 12 months while viewing objects from the THINGS image database. We trained encoding models to predict brain activity based on the embeddings of the CLIP model. Preliminary analyses show an inverse relation between delusion severity and the modeling performance (i.e., correlation between predicted and real brain activity) in regions such as the superior parietal lobule, superior frontal gyrus, precuneus, and central sulcus. These findings suggest that distortions in these regions may contribute to altered conscious experience in delusions. By leveraging the power DL-based encoding models, this research advances our understanding of how delusion may shape conscious perception.

Introduction: Presence hallucinations (PH), non-veridical sensations of someone being around you, are predictive of cognitive decline, dementia and earlier home placement in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Despite PH’s phenomenological richness, outcomes related to its perceived identity have not been explored. In this study we investigated the mechanisms underlying PH with a perceived identity in PD.

Methods: From a sample of 77 PD patients, we selected 27 patients reporting PH without dementia, and group them in PH with identity (NiPH=12) and without identity (NuPH=15), compared their disease progression stage, cognitive functions (PD-CRS), robot-induced PH sensitivity in a sensorimotor task and brain’s resting-state functional connectivity (rsfMRI: NiPH=10, NuPH=12) within the sensorimotor PH-network (Bernasconi, Blondiaux et al., 2021).

Results: iPH patients have a more advanced stage of PD (Hoehn Yahr: p=0.036), report more daily-life motor impairments (p=0.028) and more visual illusions (p=0.043), while they did not differ in their robot-induced PH sensitivity (p=0.835). Performing ROI-to-ROI analysis of PH network, we found that iPH vs. uPH patients have stronger functional dysconnectivity between inferior frontal gyrus and posterior superior temporal sulcus (p-FDR=0.020), selective on the right side. Furthermore, the degree of dysconnectivity is correlated with patients’ stronger (posterior) cognitive impairment (p=0.037).

Conclusion: Our findings show that the iPH group differs on behavioural and neural levels, compatible with a more advanced form of PD in iPH vs. uPH patients. We suggest that PH phenomenology should thus be more widely investigated in fundamental research and as a potential clinical marker for more severe forms of the disease.

Visual mental images vary in their subjective vividness, typically measured on a unidimensional scale. But how different visual qualities influence imagery vividness is poorly understood. Here, we present results from a novel method for reconstructing visual properties of mental images across varying vividness ratings. On each trial, subjects saw a line drawing of an object and were instructed to vividly imagine it in full detail. Then, they rated the vividness of their mental image on a 1-to-5 scale. Finally, a Voronoi tessellation pattern—a tiling of differently-colored shapes—appeared on the screen with three sliders controlling its sharpness, opacity, and saturation. Subjects abstracted the qualities of their mental image and applied them to the Voronoi pattern by adjusting the sliders. A mixed-effects linear model with high goodness of fit revealed that all three dimensions significantly predicted subjects’ vividness ratings. At the group level, sharpness was the strongest predictor (followed by opacity and then saturation), explaining most of the random effects variance. Sharpness was also the top predictor for the greatest number of subjects. While our results showed individual differences in what visual features influence vividness ratings, sharpness’ primacy can help guide further research into the visual properties and neural basis of mental imagery. Additionally, the modeling results were orthogonal to subjects’ VVIQ scores, suggesting that the pattern of reliance on these dimensions was independent of overall imagery capacity. In conclusion, despite the subjective nature of mental imagery, our method robustly reconstructs vividness ratings by quantifying the contributions of different visual features.

Aphantasia, the inability to generate voluntary visual imagery, is typically identified using the Vividness Of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) (Marks, 1973). Does this VVIQ-based classification really capture true mind blindness? To investigate this question, we recruited a massive cohort of 1,295 Prolific participants (aged 18–45) who completed 120 trials of an imagery task and subsequently completed the VVIQ. In each trial, two images from the 73,000-image Natural Scene Dataset (Allen et al., 2022) were presented. Participants then imagined the cued stimulus for 3 seconds and rated its vividness on a continuous scale (0–100). Our results indicate that 40 participants showed low imagery in the task (- 2 SD) while 37 showed low imagery on the VVIQ. Interestingly, only 15 participants scored below 2SD on both measures. In fact, within the low-imagery participants, the correlation between performances on the task and those on the questionnaire was not significant (p = 0.07), indicating a weak convergence between the two measures. Furthermore, we identified 9 participants with aphantasia using a strict VVIQ cutoff (minimal score) and even those participants showed residual imagery in the task (M = 24, SD = 34) with some reporting vividness reaching as high as 86 on the scale. As such, defining aphantasia using the VVIQ may misclassify individuals, as a lack of imagery on the questionnaire does not necessarily translate into real-time vividness reports. These results raise the question of which method should be used to identify imagery extremes, as both seem to exhibit little convergence in low-imagery participants.

Subjective reports on the vividness of visual imagery varies widely across individuals. The neural basis of this variability remains largely unknown. Using recently developed computational techniques, we found that human brain activity (7T fMRI) during mental imagery varies across fewer coding dimensions than activity during vision, and that the number of coding dimensions for mental imagery varies considerably across the eight subjects in our experiment. Previous fMRI research (Cui et al. 2007; Lee et al. 2012) has pointed to inter-individual differences in primary visual cortex (V1) as a potential source of variability in mental imagery vividness. Therefore, we hypothesized that variation in the number of mental imagery coding dimensions in V1 across subjects might explain variation in subjective reports of mental imagery vividness. Indeed, we found that individual differences in imagery vividness ratings obtained prior to scanning correlated with the number of imagery dimensions in V1 (r=0.71, 95% bootstrap CI: 0.15-0.98 ). No association was observed between subjects’ imagery dimensionality in other visually responsive ROIs and their vividness reports. Since each coding dimension can encode a distinct visual feature (for example, color, animacy, location of stimulus along a particular axis), a V1 with few (many) coding dimensions will represent few (many) distinct features. Our results suggest that individuals who experience vivid mental imagery have V1s that encode more imagined features than individuals who experience weak mental imagery.

To have any practical use for the study of consciousness or for downstream applications, vision decoding models that are trained to reconstruct seen images from human brain activity must be able to generalize to internally generated visual representations, i.e., mental images. In an analysis of the recently released NSD-Imagery dataset, we demonstrated that while some modern vision decoders can perform quite well on mental image reconstruction, some fail, and that state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on seen image reconstruction is no guarantee of SOTA performance on mental image reconstruction. Motivated by these findings, we developed MIRAGE, a method explicitly designed to train on vision datasets and cross-decode mental images from brain activity. MIRAGE employs a simple and robust ridge regression backbone, maps to multi-modal text and image features, and adopts multi-modal conditioning and small image embeddings as input to the Stable Cascade diffusion model. We conduct extensive evaluations with human raters and image feature metrics, establishing SOTA results for mental image reconstruction on the NSDImagery benchmark. Our work indicates that–given the right architecture–existing large-scale datasets using external stimuli are viable training data for decoding mental images, and warrant optimism about the future success and utility of mental image reconstruction for externalizing private conscious states, providing a novel and valuable tool for the study of consciousness.

Variations in mental imagery ability have been linked to emotional, cognitive, and personality traits, yet a comprehensive framework explaining their connection to mental health has been lacking. This study proposes the concept of an "inwardly focused cognitive style," which integrates traits related to mental imagery vividness, interoceptive awareness, and personality factors. Through Pearson correlation analyses, canonical correlation analysis, and structural equation modelling, we identified a latent inward trait (LIT) capturing key cognitive and personality dimensions based on cross-validated data from 591 participants across two independent sites with MRI data.

Results showed that the LIT, characterized by heightened interoceptive awareness, mindfulness, and personality traits such as openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, plays a dual role in linking mental imagery vividness (measured by the VVIQ) to mental health outcomes. Specifically, LIT is associated with enhanced emotional awareness and reduced alexithymia, which mediate the beneficial effects of vivid imagery on mental health. Our results also highlight potential vulnerabilities, as higher LIT also related higher frequency of involuntary autobiographical memories, which can exacerbate symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Additionally, LIT mediated the relationship between VVIQ and graph-theoretical measures of local efficiency in resting-state functional connectivity networks implicated in imagery processing, suggesting a neural basis for the cognitive style.

Our study provides a framework for understanding how an inwardly focused cognitive style link mental imagery and mental health. Our findings challenge the traditional view of imagery as a primarily sensory process by highlighting its connection to personality traits and emphasizing the functional aspects of the phenomenon.

The study of mental imagery extremes—aphantasia (lack of mental imagery) and hyperphantasia (exceptionally vivid imagery)—provides an opportunity to revisit key assumptions in theories of mind. These variations highlight inner diversity and challenge the common assumption that sensory-based mental representations (in the form of imagery) are a universal feature of cognition. Many cognitive models, particularly simulation theories, implicitly rely on this assumption, raising questions about how cognition functions in individuals who do not experience mental imagery in the typical way.

This talk examines how mental imagery diversity prompts a re-evaluation of simulation-based theories, using simulation theories of dreaming as a case study. These theories propose that dreaming serves as an “offline simulation” of experience, a conscious virtual simulation of a rich phenomenal world. If this is the case, how do aphantasics dream? Research suggests that some report conceptual, non-visual dreams, while others dream vividly but recall dreams less frequently. These findings raise broader questions about the role of sensory simulation in dreaming and, by extension, its necessity in waking cognition. Additionally, studying the dream experiences of aphantasics may provide new insights into the ongoing debate in philosophy and cognitive science about the nature of aphantasia—specifically, whether it involves unconscious imagery, a selective deficit in voluntary visualization, or a complete absence of mental imagery altogether.

More broadly, this talk suggests that studying cognitive diversity can refine our understanding of the mind, encouraging a more flexible approach to cognition that accounts for different ways of processing and representing experience.

The current study aligns with a highly active research field investigating the neural mechanisms underlying the contents of consciousness. This study aimed to explore the link between visual external stimuli and the corresponding content of consciousness by manipulating the latter through a perceptual phenomenon known as face pareidolia (i.e., the tendency to perceive faces in inanimate objects).

A group of healthy participants was recruited. Three sets of target stimuli were presented: faces, houses, and face-like houses. Participants were to be focused on the presentation of the stimuli while maintaining central fixation. Catch trials (i.e., target stimuli with an additional red central dot) were included. Participants were to respond as fast as possible to catch stimuli only. EEG signal was recorded throughout the experiment. The N170 component was taken into consideration, representing the most commonly used Event-related potential (ERP) marker for face processing.

ERP results revealed a N170 modulation across experimental conditions: the amplitude was larger in response to faces compared to both face-like houses and houses. In turn, N170 was found to be larger for face-like houses than for houses. Therefore, the N170 response to face-like houses suggests these stimuli are processed like real faces.

Our findings show that, when face perception neural processes are engaged, the experience of a face emerges regardless of the nature of external stimulation, thus demonstrating the constructive nature of perceptual awareness.

Through specific experimental design and stimuli, our study enriches a research domain that is extremely crucial for everyday human life.

Aphantasia is defined as the severe diminution or complete absence of mental imagery, most commonly the inability to visualize (Zeman et al. 2025), and affects around 3.9 percent of people (Dance et al. 2022). While the cognitive and neural profiles of aphantasia are currently hotly debated, a growing body of behavioral evidence shows that people with aphantasia can perform a range of tasks that were previously assumed to rely on visual imagery (e.g., mental rotation [Pounder et al. 2022], visual memory tasks [Bainbridge et al. 2021], etc.). This poses a puzzle: How can people who lack visual imagery solve visual imagery tasks? Recently, it has been proposed that the puzzle might be solved by positing that people with aphantasia have unconscious imagery, meaning that despite not reporting mental imagery experience, they still possess the underlying neural correlate (Nanay, 2021; Michel et al. 2025). However, we argue that emerging neuroscientific findings consistently point against unconscious imagery in aphantasia. Specifically, while mental imagery has been shown to rely on perception-like shared representations (e.g., Naseralis et al. 2015), activity during imagery attempts in aphantasic subjects, despite occurring in perceptual areas, does not rely on shared representations, as evidenced by a lack of cross-decodability and representational overlap between imagery and perception conditions (Chang et al. 2025; Liu et al. 2025). We invoke cognitive plasticity and neural reuse (Anderson, 2010, 2014) to suggest that these findings indicate that people with aphantasia may utilize the same neural substrate (e.g., V1) for distinct cognitive and representational strategies.

We look at consciousness through the lens of Theoretical Computer Science, a branch of mathematics that studies computation under resource limitations. From this perspective, we are developing a formal mathematical model for consciousness, the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM). We are inspired by Alan Turing’s simple yet powerful model of computation, the Turing Machine (TM), and Bernard Baars’ global workspace model (GWM) of consciousness, although the CTM is neither a TM nor a GWM. Neither is it a model of the brain; it is way to simple for that. Nevertheless, the model (1) aligns at a high level with many of the major scientific theories of human consciousness, (2) provides explanations at a high level for phenomena associated with consciousness, (3) gives insight into how a machine might have subjective consciousness, and (4) is clearly buildable. This combination supports our claim that machine consciousness is not only plausible but inevitable. I will present a brief overview of the model’s architecture and dynamics (including its global broadcasting system), indicate how Brainish, CTM’s self-generated multi-modal internal language co-evolves with CTM’s Model-of-the-World (MotW), and how the two work together to produce CTM’s feeling of consciousness.

Abstract

The last decades have seen a societal and scientific interest in meditation, hypnosis, trance, psychedelics, as well as near-death experiences. These may be collectively referred to as non-ordinary states of consciousness (NSCs). NSCs are characterised by shifts in experiential contents (i.e., what appears to the experiencer) and/or structure (i.e., how it appears to the experiencer). This in turn can allow the experiencer to gain awareness of content and/or structure of experience as a cognitive process. NSCs thus present a unique approach to investigating the plastic and dynamic nature of experience from a multiscale perspective, which includes mind, brain, body and context. No contemporary unifying framework has however been provided yet for the study of these NSCs.

In this symposium, we propose a neurophenomenological approach (combining first- and third- person methods) to the study of NSCs allowing for further gains in using the NSCs as catalysts of change and transformation in clinical practice, and helping to refine our understanding of the relationships between experiential (subjective) and neural dynamics. The framework will focus specifically on five NSCs: meditation, hypnosis, trance, psychedelics and near-death experiences. These states have mostly been studied separately until now, leading to divergent research practices, but we believe it is time to bring these different subfields closer together to improve and unify research practices. We will also outline key ethical implications of our approach to the standard conceptions of health and pathology, as well as the crucial role of experience-based know-how in NSCs-related scientific research and clinical applications.

Rationale on symposium's general scientific interest

This symposium will provide a fresh perspective on consciousness, encouraging an inclusive framework that values experiential insights alongside neuroscientific findings. This harmonisation of diverse research practices and perspectives is crucial for the development of a comprehensive understanding of consciousness and its transformative potential in therapeutic contexts. NSCs have garnered considerable attention across a range of disciplines commonly represented at ASSC conferences, from neuroscience and psychology to philosophy and clinical practice, due to their potential to uncover fundamental insights into the workings of the mind and brain. One of the key strengths of our symposium is the presentation of a robust theoretical framework, backed up by empirical validation and rigorous testing, which ensures meaningful advancement. Overall, this initiative fosters a multidisciplinary dialogue that could transform how we approach the mind, making it of significant interest to the scientific community.

Rationale on complementarity of talks

The symposium offers a structured and complementary exploration of NSCs through a neurophenomenological approach, with each speaker contributing unique insights.

Dr. Timmermann will introduce neurophenomenology, illustrating how psychedelic experiences provide a controlled way to study consciousness shifts. This sets the foundation for understanding NSCs from a brain dynamics perspective.

Next, Dr. Bauer will present recent scientific work on meditation and hypnosis, highlighting how self-regulated, non-pharmacological states offer a contrasting yet complementary view. Dr. Bauer will also discuss clinical aspects of these NSCs, demonstrating how these practices can support mental health and well-being.

Dr. Gosseries will expand this framework by further discussing hypnosis and trance, which blend elements of voluntary and suggestible consciousness modifications. Her talk will also provide insights into clinically induced NSCs, emphasizing their therapeutic potential.

Finally, Dr. Martial will explore how these NSCs can model near-death experiences, using laboratory simulations to shed light on otherwise inaccessible phenomena. This unique synthesis will show how NSCs can mirror more extreme shifts in consciousness.

Together, these talks present a cohesive narrative, demonstrating neurophenomenology’s versatility across NSCs, from pharmacologically induced to self-induced and clinically guided states, while addressing clinical and ethical implications.

Rationale on timeliness/importance

The symposium is both timely and important because it addresses the increasing societal and scientific interest in understanding NSCs, which are gaining recognition in fields of psychology, neuroscience, and clinical therapy. With recent advances in brain imaging and neuroscience, there is a growing capacity to explore how experiences such as meditation, hypnosis, and psychedelics affect brain function and consciousness. This makes it a crucial moment to unify research efforts across diverse fields that have historically operated in isolation.

The integration of first- and third-person methods to study these states is especially relevant now, as it offers a novel approach for bridging subjective experience and objective brain dynamics. This multidisciplinary perspective is poised to push the boundaries of current therapeutic practices, providing innovative treatments for mental health conditions. Furthermore, ethical concerns surrounding NSCs, such as the clinical use of psychedelics, are gaining attention, making it vital to discuss these issues and their implications for health and pathology.

By unifying separate research domains and addressing pressing ethical questions, the symposium is well-positioned to contribute to a deeper, more integrative understanding of consciousness at a pivotal time in the evolution of cognitive science and clinical practices. Last but not least, NSCs, particularly those observed and applied in clinical settings, have been largely underrepresented in previous ASSC conferences, making this symposium a novel and valuable addition.

Rationale on panel inclusivity

This symposium reflects a strong commitment to diversity across multiple dimensions. It features four speakers, including one male and three female presenters. The speakers come from diverse national origins and cultural backgrounds, offering perspectives shaped by their unique experiences. They bring multilingual capabilities, which enhances the symposium's inclusivity and accessibility for a broader audience.

The panel members are at the early to mid stages of their scientific and clinical careers, providing fresh insights and fostering the growth of emerging voices in the field. This aligns with a commitment to nurturing the next generation of researchers and clinicians, while also promoting diverse career stages in academic discourse.

The symposium also values diversity in scientific and clinical backgrounds, with speakers specializing in various disciplines relevant to NSCs. This interdisciplinary approach enriches the discussion by incorporating a range of methodologies and perspectives.

Furthermore, attention has been given to inclusivity regarding disability, ensuring that the symposium environment is accessible to all participants. For example, with the organisers, we will arrange for wheelchair-accessible seating. We will use visual aids to support participants with hearing impairments, and presentation materials will be available in accessible digital formats, supporting those with visual impairments. We will also ensure that all slides use color schemes that are easily distinguishable, with alternative textures and labels, to accommodate individuals with color blindness.

By honoring diversity in gender, career stage, scientific background, cultural experiences, and accessibility, the symposium aims to create a platform that genuinely represents the multifaceted nature of the scientific community.

Abstract

A growing body of research suggests that the brain operates near criticality, the point at a phase transition between order and disorder. This concept is emerging as a promising framework for understanding diverse phenomena in neuroscience. This symposium will explore the role of measures of brain criticality to study consciousness. We will introduce the foundational concepts of criticality, detailing its theoretical underpinnings and relevance as a unifying framework in the neuroscience of consciousness. We will explore research showing how individual differences in levels of synchronisation which manifest through differences in cognition and consciousness can be mapped through brain states which occupy an extended critical regime yielding certain functional advantages. We will also present evidence from computational modelling across 103 mammal species showing that measures relating to brain criticality may convey information as to informational processing across species and its relationship to consciousness. We will finally discuss how deviations from a criticality may give clinically useful information as to the pathological/perturbed brain’s proximity to a conscious or healthy state, also by using measures of proximity to a first order phase transition we can detect the speed of recovery of consciousness from anaesthesia. Bringing together experts from diverse fields, the session aims to shed light on how criticality — the state of being poised between order and disorder — might provide insights into the mechanisms underlying consciousness.

Rationale on symposium's general scientific interest

By bringing ideas from physics and complexity science to diverse methodologies, including electrophysiology, neuroimaging, computational modelling, and neuromodulation, this symposium addresses at several domains that are relevant to attendees of the ASSC. We bring together researchers from a diverse set of fields, offering their perspective from not only within the heart of the science of consciousness, but also introducing ideas about how criticality underwrites efficient information processing in cognition and more broadly across species, thus creating a cohesive and comprehensive view of how this framework can uniquely enhance our understanding of brain function.

Rationale on complementarity of talks

Each talk of the symposium gives a unique perspective on brain criticality providing a progression from theoretical foundations to electrophysiology and neuromodulatory work to functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans and computational modelling across species. While the symposium showcases brain criticality, we also aim to captivate a broad audience interested in consciousness science. The presentations provide a comprehensive view of the criticality framework’s applications, from neurological conditions like disorders of consciousness and epilepsy to pharmacological perturbations such as psychedelics and anaesthesia, alongside broader neuroscientific considerations for optimal information processing supporting cognition.

Rationale on timeliness/importance

Experimental support for the brain criticality hypothesis began two decades ago, gaining recent momentum due to large-scale data and interdisciplinary methods from physics and complexity science. Evidence now highlights criticality’s potential as a unifying framework in neuroscience, appearing frequently in publications across various fields. Criticality is also becoming relevant for clinical efforts to characterise conditions like disorders of consciousness, epilepsy, and schizophrenia. This symposium aims to provide a comprehensive overview of brain criticality, and aims to appeal to both those with a passing interest in the increasingly popular topic and those who wish to delve deeper into the methodological formulations.

Rationale on panel inclusivity

We are researchers from multiple career stages, including two PhD students: Naji Alnagger, a UK born, middle-eastern researcher based in Belgium who organised the symposium and who will act as the chair, and Canadian-based researcher Jordan O’Byrne who will provide the vital opening presentation of the topic. We also have Gustavo Deco who for the past 20 years has contributed some of the most important advances in computational neuroscience. Satu Palva, is a senior researcher at the University of Glasgow, she has been a principal investigator since 2011. UnCheol Lee is a Korean associate professor currently at the University of Michigan.

Mental illusion is one of the key phenomena in conscious perception; nevertheless, its neural bases remain elusive. We used non-invasive electrical brain stimulation and functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate this. During the experiment, participants viewed flickering red and green visual stimuli, perceiving them either as distinct, non-fused colors or as a mentally generated fused color (orange). Applying transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (a key node of the central executive network) compared to the medial prefrontal cortex (a key node of the default-mode network) enhanced first-order and higher-order thalamocortical connectivity during the conscious perception of the mentally fused illusory orange color. Our findings suggest the neurophysiological bases of tACS-mediated network-wide neuromodulation and demonstrate a feasible, non-invasive approach to modulating thalamocortical functional connectivity.

Introduction: Previous studies have suggested that prefrontal cortex selectively affects conscious visibility but not objective performance. In Del Cul et al. (2009) this conclusion was reached based on subjective reports in a backward masking task in patients with focal prefrontal lesions. Here we test the idea that prefrontal damage may not be selective for conscious perception and that previous results can be explained solely based on increased noise during perceptual decision-making.

Methods: We reproduced the original simulation using a single-route sensory evidence accumulator with variable strength of noise for the two experimental groups. We are currently running an experiment where healthy participants undergo two experimental blocks in a randomized order: (1) the metacontrast masking task from Del Cul et al., 2009 (simulating the control participants), and (2) the very same task but with the addition of random dynamical visual noise (simulating the patients).

Results: We reproduced the main features of the original results through simulation without assuming a selective effect of prefrontal cortex on conscious perception. The optimal set of parameters indicated stronger noise in the case of the patients. An empirical test of this hypothesis on healthy participants is currently in progress.

Conclusion: Our simulation showed that the pattern of the results from Del Cul et al. (2009) can be reproduced simply by varying the strength of visual noise in the experimental stimuli. We propose a simple experimental approach to test it empirically. If confirmed, the selective causal role of prefrontal cortex in visual consciousness is not supported.

Traditional research on neural correlates of conscious (NCC) perception has primarily focused on external stimuli. In the EEG studies with auditory stimuli, event-related potential (ERP) correlates Auditory Awareness Negativity (AAN) and Late Positivity (LP) have been found to correlate with conscious auditory perception. During speaking, the brain monitors self-produced sounds to ensure that the vocalization match the expectations. We investigated to what extent AAN and LP correlate with auditory awareness of errors in self-produced vocalization.

We recorded EEG with 66-channels from 40 individuals, each participating in two experimental sessions. During session 1, participants vocalized /a/, and heard their voice through headphones.

During the vocalization, a short artificial near-threshold pitch change was introduced into their auditory feedback (2IFC task). The participant’s task was to assess in which interval the pitch change was presented, and rate how well they heard it using the perceptual awareness scale.

During session 2, the task remained the same but the participants listened to recordings of their own voice from session 1. Session 2 corresponds to traditional studies of ERP correlates of consciousness and enables a comparison of how the NCC perception of errors in self-produced voice differ from correlates of perceiving external sounds.

We hypothesized that AAN and LP are stronger during the session 1 than session 2 because the brain can better predict their voice when they produce it (session 1) than hear it in playback (session 2). Our study is among the first to investigate the role of auditory awareness in speech motor control.

Perceptual consciousness, the subjective experience associated with sensory processing, remains a key challenge in neuroscience. While neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) have been isolated by comparing brain activity when a stimulus is perceived versus when it is not, the mechanisms accounting for the temporal dynamics of conscious perception remain largely unexplored. In this study, we recorded stereotactic EEG (sEEG) during a face detection task with two stimulus intensity levels (detection threshold or higher) and two durations (short or long), followed by a temporal reproduction task where participants reported their perceived stimulus duration. We replicated the magnitude-duration illusion, whereby high-intensity stimuli were perceived for longer durations. We assumed that a true neural correlate of perceptual consciousness should encode if and for how long a stimulus is perceived, irrespective of its physical properties. We identified channels in the mid-fusiform cortex tracking stimulus detection irrespective of report, as well as perceived duration. We interpret our findings based on a computational model of leaky evidence accumulation, which assumes that a percept becomes conscious when accumulated sensory evidence reaches a perceptual threshold and persists until it drops below this threshold.

By linking the dynamics of intracranial electrophysiological activity to subjective reports of detection and duration as well as mechanistic predictions, our work advances our understanding of the mechanisms governing the temporal dynamics of perceptual consciousness, and offers novel insights into the true neural correlates of perceptual experience.

In typical experiments on visual crowding (the deteriorating influence of clutter on target perception), observers are informed about the stimulus category they have to report. For example, observers are asked to report letters. This prior information strongly limits the response space to a few categorical (letter) responses, and may influence how targets are perceived. Here, we investigated to what extent prior experience with letter stimuli increased the likelihood of letter pareidolia – seeing letters in letter-like stimuli. Targets consisted of letters and letter-like stimuli, presented in isolation or flanked by Xs (crowded) at 10° eccentricity to the left or right of fixation. Observers reported target appearance by placing lines on a freely viewed response grid. There were two conditions: In the Letters First (LF) condition, observers were first presented with letters, in the Letters Second (LS) condition with letter-like stimuli. We hypothesized that compared to the LS condition, prior experience of letters in the LF condition would bias observers to report letters instead of the presented letter-like targets. The results showed strong deviations of the captured from the presented targets, especially when the targets were crowded. Quantifying how often observers reported the corresponding letter targets when presented with letter-like stimuli revealed that LF observers erroneously ‘corrected’ the letter-like stimuli to letters more frequently than LS observers. Our results show that prior experience of letter stimuli strongly influenced appearance reports. We suggest that, as in pareidolia, target reports in visual crowding are often based on partial information completed into meaningful objects.

Size coding refers to how the visual system encodes and represents object size. This mechanism operates at the earliest stages of visual processing, with larger stimuli eliciting stronger and earlier neural responses than smaller ones under normal viewing conditions. Traditionally, this mechanism is thought to require visual awareness, but whether size coding can occur outside of consciousness remains an open question. Investigating this phenomenon is crucial for refining our understanding of the role of consciousness in visual perception.

To address this question, we recorded the electroencephalographic activity (n=33) and employed Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) to manipulate visual awareness of different-sized rings. Using a staircase procedure, we determined the threshold at which stimuli broke through CFS in approximately half of trials for each subject, to balance the number of conscious and unconscious trials. Participants performed a size discrimination task, in a 2AFC paradigm. Subjective awareness was assessed using the Perceptual Awareness Scale, while accuracy was measured through catch trials and behavioural responses.

Behavioural results showed that the performance in the discriminative task was impaired during unconscious trials. The ongoing analyses include the study of event-related potentials, time-frequency responses, and steady-state visually evoked potentials induced by CFS, aiming to explore their potential in predicting behavioral performance and subjective awareness. By combining behavioural and EEG results, we aim to determine whether the impaired performance observed during unconscious trials extends to neural activity, or if a dissociation emerges, suggesting a role for unconscious mechanisms in size coding—a process traditionally considered fully conscious.